yanked the odd hardware like GPU and hard drives, as well as the common stuff like DVI video capture device, both floppy drives, optical drive, and serial port
I had to go find another keyboard though. my spare keyboard on hand is an AT keyboard, and while of course I have a (hand made!) AT-to-PS/2 adapter, this computer for some reason only has USB ports.
I can't understand these companies just expecting us to have obscure hardware on hand to diagnose their failures.
WE'VE GOT ERRORS! hitting a bunch of RAM problems around 31-39gb.
nastily that's divided between two banks. So... it's probably not just one pair of DIMMS going bad.
(and of course it's also possible it's some other problem that's causing RAM issues)
with half ram, I did two successful passes of memtest86+, no errors. time to check THE OTHER HALF (to confirm if it was just a needs-reseating/too much ram for the mobo problem)
and it passes too.
So, either my motherboard has stopped being able to support 64gb, or it was just a reseating problem. Let's stick it back in and see.
I really don't like that it corrupted outside of the text window.
That shouldn't be happening if this is just a RAM problem. That's like... a GPU corruption problem.
Which is very bad because I'm currently using the CPU's on-die GPU
NOPE! it ran for 3 hours, threw a ton of memory errors, then crashed in the same matrixy way.
So, back to just one pair of sticks, and I'm gonna let memtest run for a while and see if that seems stable.
OK so ran the half-ram test for nearly 8 hours with zero issues.
Now I've reattached the GPU, usb ports, serial port, floppy drives, and rust drives and optical drives (but not the m.2 ssds yet because they're boot drives) and I'm running it again, to confirm it's not a PSU problem
Memtest didn't complete, but for a very silly reason: I have my computer up on the desk and plugged into a different outlet for this testing, which means there's a power cable crossing the doorway.
When I left the room, moving the cable so I could go under it slid it out of the power supply and it shut off
memtest completed and now I'm going full on stress testing: playing fullscreen video, 3D games, processing a bunch of shit in the background, some VMs. you know, the usual stuff I do on an average day
So, it's probably one of motherboard, cpu, or PSU. At a stretch, it could be the GPU.
I have another spare GPU I could swap in. I have a near-identical CPU that I could swap in (it's in use, but I can temporarily borrow it).
PSU and mobo are trickier.
So, I'll have to try the easy ones first. Swap the GPU and see if windows still hard crashes like that, then the cpu, then start working on the others.
If you'd like to help me get back online (and gay cats, of course), donations would help. I'm kinda broke and not having a working computer is not going to help.
okay today's first test: I yanked out my GPU and I'm running on just the internal GPU. I'm gonna load up some videos, VMs, 3D games, and a bunch of browser tabs. See if this falls over too
somehow I got my youtube video playing over my actual speakers but one of the games playing out the HDMI and the little speakers on the monitor. that's weird.
okay I've made it an hour running sans-GPU. That doesn't mean it's the GPU though. This machine is using way less power without the GPU... so it could still be a PSU related problem.
so after running fine for about 3 hours with no GPU, I've gone out and bought a new... power supply.
yeah I don't think it's the GPU. And a flakey PSU could easily fail with the GPU and not without, since the power usage is way lower without a GPU in there
okay new PSU is in. That took way longer than it should.
Apparently between the RM650x and the RM850x, Corsair redesigned their modular cables, so I couldn't just swap the PSU and reuse the cables. So now I have a cable management nightmare, but it's running. Let's put the stress-testing pants on
the worst part is that I forgot to double-check that the new PSU would come with the right cables to let me hook up my floppy drives. Thankfully, it did.
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