H55-G43 Stability Problems

SereneAurora

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Sep 25, 2010
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Long winded, sorry in advance and I appreciate anyone reading. I'm not an expert yet but I'm learning more every day. Here goes:

I built this rig a couple of months ago, second one I've ever built on my own. Been having intermittent issues ever since. Sometimes it will run great for a couple of weeks, and then it starts crashing again - a night filled with blue screen after blue screen, though sometimes mixed in with a BSOD will be Windows telling me it's not Genuine, or my ethernet and sound drivers go out of whack. (Though that's usually fixed in 2 or 3 minutes because it BSODs again.)

Now, I am using Win7 64 bit, which I'm sure is probably some part of my problem. However, this board can support up to 16GB of memory, so I do plan to go past my current 4GB. I do a lot of video/graphic work and gaming (I built the box with FFXIV in mind, though that game SUCKS.) I'm not doing any overclocking, RAID, or anything special. I'm just using it out of the box.

Some of the BSODs have included: BAD_POOL_HEADER, SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, and APC_INDEX_MISMATCH.

I have tried SO many things to try and fix this, here's a list of what I can remember trying:

~ Bios updated from 1.0 to 1.4
~ MemCheck86 is clean.
~ Firmware on hard drive and CD drive is up to date
~ System restore sometimes helps stop the cycle for one night, but then it's back the next day.
~ Switched the positions of the memory chips.
~ Verified connections inside, SATA cables swapped, made sure no kinks.
~ Reformatted and started from scratch three times now. Fine for a few days (sometimes a week or more), then it starts again.
~ When it's having a "crash night" (multiple BSODs in a row), safe mode doesn't help. It will blue screen in safe mode, too.

One other odd symptom, and maybe this is my clue on what to RMA first. Ever since I built it, I noticed that it takes 2-3 seconds after pressing the power button for the system to actually begin to power on. Not a big deal and I ignored it at first, but now I'm wondering. When I swapped the places of the memory, this went away briefly (though it returned).

Another thing I have noticed is that in the Device Manager, there is a PCI Simple Communications Controller (PCI Bus 0, Device 22) that has no driver, and Windows can't find one. I've downloaded and installed all the drivers for this board from both MSI and Intel, but it still insists that there is something it doesn't know how to run. Not sure if this phantom device is my BSOD problem or not, but I'd like to eliminate it as a cause.

Is there a particular device on this mainboard known to have this problem? I looked at the hardware ID of this unknown one and saw that it does strangely have the same ID of the ethernet card (which is working fine at present). Now, I used the MSI updater and it says there's a new ethernet driver right now (updated 9.27.10). Great. However, when I try to run it, it's failing with a popup of "Findfile failed". I removed the ethernet driver, ran DriverSweeper (though I don't think it found anything ethernet related), then tried again with this fresh version. It fails again with the "Findfile failed, and doesn't install at all. I had to let Windows automatically put the driver back, which works all right.

MSI simply asked me to retest HDD, memory, and CPU, but I do not have the resources to do this - I have no extra components around that fit the CPU and memory. I did test the HDD and know it to be sound, even though it's a little on the old side.

I'm to the point of starting to RMA components until I figure out which one it is, but I'd be very happy for any suggestions that will help me avoid that path. Last problems I had were 4-5 days ago. The intermittent nature makes it extremely difficult to figure out what's going on!

~Sarah
 
All right, I think I did it right. One chip is out. The frequency already seemed to be running at 1333, but I changed the Command Rate to 2T.

Feel free to check my work:

http://sereneaurora.com/commandrate.JPG
http://sereneaurora.com/frequency.JPG

Any ideas on what to keep an eye out for? Am I just waiting for it to crash again, or is there something else that might help show an issue? If I don't get a crash right away, should I test with the other memory chip?
 
Watch your system for a while and see if it crashes again or not.  If it doesn't, put the other module back in and retest (keep the Command Rate @2T).
 
Well whaddya know.

So with one chip I let it run a few days. No blue screens since I last wrote, so I decided to go ahead and swap out the chips.

The delay between pressing the power button and the system actually booting was gone again the first time. Yet the moment Windows 7 booted, we went blue screen again, with ntfs.sys error listed. However, a reboot seems to be functioning, I still have that chip in now as I'm writing this.

Does that tell us anything? I would assume this means this is a bad stick of RAM. I browsed around in the Event Viewer and wasn't sure what information might be helpful. Is there a log I can rummage up that will help?

Thanks again for your assistance.
~Sarah
 
I ran the memcheck 86+ on both chips separately. (I will definitely know to do it this way from here on out.)

The one that experienced the crash had thousands of errors.
The chip that had not crashed came through the test clean.

Frustrating that the one good chip seems to have been "covering" for the bad chip when I ran the memory test the first time, but it would seem that I at long last have my answer. Is there any other insight on this, anything else that I should do? I am planning to start up an RMA on the chips tonight.

Thank you very much! This saved me probably another month of annoyance because I was planning on returning the board first.
~Sarah
 
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