After updating the BIOS, some games become unresponsive on the PC.
After updating the BIOS, some games become unresponsive on the PC.
This situation seems quite odd. My setup includes an Intel 12900k (stock), ASUS Z690-G MATX motherboard, 64GB 5200MHz DDR5 RAM, Samsung 980 Pro 2TB SSD boot drive plus additional SSDs for Steam library overflow. I also have an EVGA FTW3 3080ti (undervolted to 1830MHz at 850mV) and an EVGA G6 1000W power supply. Recently, I updated my BIOS and experienced frequent crashes in a game called Anno 2205, especially when the system freezes completely. These crashes are severe lockups that only resolve with a hard reset. Running Memtest on the RAM with XMP enabled showed no issues. Stress tests on the GPU and CPU passed without problems. I haven’t overclocked the CPU, so it should be stable at stock speed. The machine is about six months old and has performed well since I assembled it. Usually, a single game crash isn’t a big concern, but having an application crash the whole system in modern Windows is unusual. This makes me think there might be a problem with my hardware or firmware.
Upgrade BIOS to the latest stable release and verify it exhibits instability.
I can't reduce the BIOS settings (ASUS confirmed it isn’t compatible). Once I turned off all GPU overclocking and memory tricks, the game ran longer but displayed a blue screen due to MEMORY_MANAGEMENT error. My RAM passed memtest without issues, even with XMP disabled. I plan to submit the bugcheck results tomorrow.
It's understandable to feel relieved when you're part of testing. At least it looks like they're making progress.
I've included a screenshot of the bugcheck details. The dump file is available at the provided link. After three passes, memtest86 completed without errors and used XMP, matching the results with XMP. I executed sfc /scannow, which detected and fixed corrupted files; though it might be misleading, the logs indicated only bluetooth sysfiles were replaced, with all others verified. I also ran DISM.exe /Online /Cleanup-image /Restorehealth, but no additional issues were found.
I just ran the problem game after the repair and it lasted two hours, which suggests I’m in a solid state now (passed memtest, no crashes in Windows when it used to). I plan to turn XMP back on, do another Memtest tonight, and test the game again to confirm. I’d really like my 5200Mhz 40-40-40-77 over the 4000Mhz base speed of my memory—better than that! Also curious if the crashes in games were due to bad RAM timings or clocks, since those wouldn’t show up in memtest86. During a full 8-hour Memtest, hardware/firmware issues should surface properly.
Not really, MemTest checks the stability of the drives. Visit the mainboard vendors' website and look for chipset driver updates. That could actually help. I've noticed some servers become unstable when BIOS and chipset drivers aren't updated together—usually update the chipset first, then upgrade BIOS to get stable drivers after loading. For the Z690 on ASUS, the latest version I found is 3.0.0.1457 from September 19, 2022.
It was just on some HP servers where Finnickey talked about the fix. Our setup should function regardless, but I believe a new BIOS might be needed if it isn't stable in games yet.