I recently started having some weird issues with my PC which has been causing issues with streaming and uploading the videos you Youtube (you may have noticed that my Minecraft series hasn’t been updated for a while), well during a stream I kept having various things crash at random including Minecraft and OBS, I have saved the files to combine and upload but wanted to figure out the fault first.
Worst moment was when I rebooted my PC and it just hung on boot, no display but everything seemed to be turned on (right then I missed the old PC speaker).
After various tests it seemed the fault was down to the RAM with one pair needing to be replaced, I feel extremely lucky that someone that I have met through streaming happened to have some spare and offered this to me. I replaced it and figured that’ll be it right?
Wrong. It all seemed ok for a while but then things started going weird again, I’d start up my PC and the sound service would crash, or when I streamed I would get random times when the system would slow down with frame rate drops or appearing to hitch. Worst was the last Minecraft stream where my framerate literally halved on stream with the system struggling to even hit 30 FPS at times, even in places where previously I was getting 100+.
And then it happened again, rebooted the system and it just hung, though this time it had the RAM and GPU diagnostic lights on so I thought “damn, I hope my graphics card is fine” and started disassembly.
To cut the story short individually everything is working fine, and would even boot if there was a single stick of RAM in, but put in more and it just failed. I figured that it was unlikely to be the RAM and to make it weirder resetting the BIOS allowed it to work but enable XMP and dead again.
The provided a hint to me as I know the memory controller is on the CPU so I downloaded and ran OCCT’s CPU and Memory stability test, which didn’t even get to the 3 minute mark before failing on the CPU.
So at last I narrowed it down, the CPU was faulty and, it was pointed out, it failed on 2 cores exactly like the memory test which would indicate that the RAM might never have been faulty.
First thing I did then was to turn off all turbo boosting and PBO in the BIOS allowing the CPU to run at base speed, this seemed to give me some stability back alowing me to figure my next move. Obviously I needed a new CPU but which one. Knowing Amazon Prime Day was coming up I figured it was best to wait until then to buy it. This turned out to be a good idea as it let me upgrade to the Ryzen 9 5950X for ALL THE CORES!
This has been fitted, it has passed OCCT testing and even peaked at 5.05Ghz! The only issue is then we had a heatwave in the UK which meant that my room was over 30C and as soon as I tried to game in there I was dripping with sweat, which I am sure that people will not really want to see?
So to sum up, RAM probably isn’t faulty, CPU was faulty, system now seems to be stable and I will be back to streaming once it cools down as I have this thing called a Saroo to test out on my Saturn and we still haven’t introduced Joe to the dragon in Minecraft.
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