Gotta love it when you think you've got a lock on what's causing your intermittent, under-load system hard resets, and it turns out you were objectively incorrect and drawing false conclusions, and the realisation is always like seeing Space for the first time, or opening the Vault Door into the wasteland - the pond is way bigger than your little fish brain thought.
It's a bit of a winding path, but,
Gotta be GPU temps, only happens in games, seems to happen when it passes 90C! Terrible! Clean it out.
Great, temps dropped to 85C, that sh-... Hm. Still crashes. Remove all OCs. St-... Still crashes, huh? Alright, FPS limit, game settings on lowest-... STILL? Hm. Power limit, 85%, HA, there we go, usage is under 70%, temps are stable at ~65C-..... What. Why? How? Is it my CPU temps? It can't be my CPU temps - I've got a fucking Noctua Chromax on this thing, nothing I do should overload that finned monolith...
Error Event ID 18... Processor core error? Fuck, is my 5600X going? S2FG. Cache hierarchy error? What the fuck does-hm, another error, Kernal-core, event ID 41... Power draw?
googles.
So... My poor CPU is trying to precision boost overdrive, is doing its best with the best consumer cooling money can buy, short of thermosyphon or custom water loops, and it's doing SO WELL...
But sometimes it spikes a voltage on the 4th core really hard, as the system warms up, and the whole system flatlines. At least, that's where I'm at so far.
The next three courses of action are:
- Update the BIOS: apparently an update 2yrs ago fixed this issue for a lot of people.
- Turn off Precision Boost Overdrive: frustrating, but I'll do it for stability.
- If those fail, apparently hard-setting a voltage to prevent the spike can also work, but gives up a lot of the flexible performance potential of this CPU, which sucks even more.
Should also gear up for a full fin clean of all the heatsinks and swap out my thermal paste. My poor 1070ti pushing 1440p 100+hz high/ultra settings in most games, +10% OC, such a beast, does so damn well, just needs an oil change and she'll keep slayin'.
Sigh. It's like whatever that idiom is that refers to the burden of home ownership (being about how the maintenance and upkeep is literally a job itself), but for PC DIYers.
more like Burden of Entropy.