My spare PC keeps crashing

[mikeymikec]

Spec:
AMD Phenom II X4 960T, running completely at stock
4GB DDR3
ASUS M4A89GTD PRO/USB3, latest BIOS
GeForce 760
Samsung 850 PRO 128GB (boot)
Corsair VX550W
Windows 10 (up-to-date)

The history is a bit convoluted. The graphics card and PSU come from my previous 'spare PC' which was 100% stable (Nehalem build) and I gave to my brother. I kept those bits because he didn't need them and I do need a PC with a bit of graphical oomph and accelerated H264 for DVD ripping. The rest of the hardware was from a computer build I did for a customer back in 2011 and it had a couple of stability incidents (one I mentioned here, the PC had been crashing but the CPU HSF was a bit dusty, I also deactivated the two additional cores that had been activated 'just in case'). After the first, the PC was fine for a few months. The second involved graphical glitching and crashing (onboard graphics) and random BSODs.

I did a clean install of Windows 10 onto a spare SSD I had and started using this computer for ripping DVDs/BRs with Handbrake. Sometimes GPU-assisted, sometimes not. I got the occasional BSOD (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, 0x00000119, BlueScreenViewer cites various DLLs as the cause, mostly system ones). I tried switching graphics card drivers too. The PC has handled ~20 hr long software encodes, and it's not as if it only fails with GPU workloads.

Today however has been interesting: Four BSODs while idle (and I haven't given it any work to do), including KERNEL_SECURITY_CHECK_FAILURE.

I've run memtest86+ 5.01 overnight at least once while I've suspected stability issues, no errors. I've Prime95'd it on various settings for at least half an hour, but now I think we can safely say it's not load related.

Previously I've wondered if the extra two cores were an issue but since I've had quite a few crashes since setting it back to a standard 960T, either the CPU is faulty or I can rule it out.

There's nothing particularly of interest in the event log around the time of the BSODs or otherwise.

I'm inclined to believe that the board has had it, but if anyone has any ideas here for testing/narrowing down the problem, let me know. I hate sending OK hardware to the dump!

I'm going to run memtest 4.3.7 (the machine isn't UEFI so that's the latest version) just in case the memory has become 'more' faulty recently.

 

[mikeymikec]

One other thing I've remembered, the first time this computer had stability issues (when my customer owned it), as the BSODs aligned fairly well with faulty memory and the customer wanted a quick solution, I swapped the memory out for new modules as a test, but it didn't stop the stability issues.

Memtest 4.3.7 has run four passes and counting, but IMO it seems highly unlikely to be purely a memory problem now.

 

[Steltek]

Have you run an SFC /scannow session? Also, it might not be a bad idea to run a DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /CheckHealth session to check for errors. If either finds errors, it might not be a bad idea to run Chkdsk to check for file system corruption.

One last thing you could try, after doing a backup, is to try to do a repair install from within Windows.

 

[Shmee]

If you have not solved the issue by now, you could check the SSD, and possibly a CPU stress test.

 

[mindless1]

Considering its age, I'd pull the PSU, pop it open and inspect for vented capacitors while cleaning dust out.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hmm, while that kit is "old", it's still somewhat usable. I can see why you wouldn't want to junk it.

My guess is the PSU, the Corsair "VX" (or was that the "VS") is their bottom-of-the barrel line.

 

[mikeymikec]

The VS is definitely the bottom of the line, but the VX back in 2008-2011 were Seasonic-made.

I had done stuff like prime95 on it, SSD chkdsk turned out fine. Since it's a fresh install I didn't do sfc.

As I have a spare-spare PC with the same board, I've since taken the PSU, GPU, RAM, SSD and HDD from this one and transplanted it into spare-spare, which has been working fine. It would be nice restoring the 960T to its former 6-core glory in the spare-spare PC, but since I suspect either the 960T or the board, I'm sticking with the Ph2X4 already in spare-spare.

I've run a few Handbrake jobs on the spare-spare PC since the transplant and it seems to be fine, but since I've ripped my film collection completely I don't have much 'useful testing' to do with it atm, which leaves my plans to reintroduce the 960T in limbo as well as throwing out the remains of the first PC.