Instability Asus Crosshair Dark Hero VIII X570 details and related information
Instability Asus Crosshair Dark Hero VIII X570 details and related information
To preface this, I've done a ton of research into this problem. I'm not the only one and RMAs don't seem to help. Whatever's going on here is just considered a normal operating quirk of either the Dark Hero, the higher end Ryzen 5000 chips or both. Simply put, the system will crash at a firmware level every so often. It doesn't matter if it's under load or idle, it can just lock up with no response to even holding the power button. This immediately makes me think motherboard, but it was suggested by others that RAM could be the cause. I've tried disabling Gear Down mode as well as DDR Power Down - this had no effect, and may even have made it worse. Someone else suggested increasing the DRAM Voltage, and that yielded some really interesting results. In Asus's BIOS, if you're not familiar, you get your input field for the voltage and a little box to the left showing what voltage would be applied by default. Normally, this field is set to "Auto". When you enable DOCP, this field changes to whatever the DOCP profile sets. What's interesting, however, is that the default value in that little box keeps changing. One boot, it might be 1.27V. Another, it could be as high as 1.38V. Often, after a crash, it'll read above whatever you try and set indicating that the BIOS seems to think the memory needs more voltage. Surely, though, 1.38V is enough? I even tried redlining it at 1.4V but it still wanted more (which I was not willing to give it, I don't believe that's safe). It was also suggested to me that 5950X CPUs can sometimes be very badly binned, and when using PBO it can cause significant instability where certain cores (or even entire CCDs) are less up to the task. Someone even suggested that the IO die could've been badly binned, and that was causing the apparent memory instability. If this is the case, there's little I can do because I've passed my return window now. I'm not necessarily looking for a solution, although I'll take it if you have one, but rather just second opinions that might help me piece together a picture of what's going on in my little box of thinking sand. System Specs: AMD Ryzen 5950X (PBO Enabled, Core Enhancements Enabled) Noctua NH-D15 chromax Corsair Vengence LPX 3600Mhz/C16 (DOCP Enabled) Asus Crosshair Dark Hero VIII X570 Samsung 980 Pro 1TB x2 LG Optical Drive Hotplug 2.5 inch SATA Bay Samsung 870 Evo 2TB Nvidia RTX 3090 Founders LSi 9211-8i HBA 5x Seagate IronWolf Pro 6TB Corsair HXi 1000W PSU
Verify the thaiphoon burner for RAM ICs—some components don’t handle higher voltages well (die failure), while others ignore even modest voltages like 1.7 or 2.2V when running at high frequencies (rev, e, djr, etc.). It seems unnecessary to exceed 1.4V for a 3600 RPM clock; aiming for up to 1.5V might be reasonable, anything above is clearly excessive and usually only needed if pushing very high clocks like 1.7V for over 5000 cycles on 8Gb or 16Gb rev engines.