crosshair VIII extreme + 5950x, strange unstability issue with D.O.C.P enabled

[fcueto]

Hi,

I have the following setup:
- ROG Crosshair VIII extreme
- Ryzen 5950x
- G.SKill ram F4-3600C16D-64GVK (2 x 32GB)

At "stock" ram speed (1333Mhz), everything works fine, the system is rock solid and I can use it for days without crashing.

When I enable D.O.C.P to get 1800Mhz, the system seems stable (I can run memtest and other stress tools for hours without error), but after 2 or 3 days of uptime, often at idle or when watching youtube videos, the system suddenly becomes unstable : I cannot launch any new task, I even cannot call the task manager, all running tasks becomes unresponsive one after another. Ultimately, all I can do is a forced shutdown/reboot.

I have no WHEA errors in my event viewer.

I tried adding some voltage to the SOC with no success (up to 1.17V). But I'm pretty sure the issue is not related to the SOC voltage because as I said, all stress tests run smoothly.

I tried to disable D.O.C.P and manually set the RAM timings and voltage (up to 1.5V instead of the 1.45V required for DOCP), but no success.
I also tried to lower the ram frequency to 1600Mhz but the issue remains.

Now I'm lost because I don't even know where my problem comes from. Motherboard ? processor ? RAM ?

Can someone help me on this ?

Thank you.

[xacity]

fcueto wrote:
OK after several weeks of investigations I finally caught the culprit. It was not a hardware problem but a software problem with Asus Armoury Crate. As soon as I use the fan monitoring I got these strange crashes I described.

I have read many forum posts about the exact same crashes with Nzxt Cam but in the end, it's exactly the same with armoury crate. I wonder if the bug could come from the uefi ?

I think you might be right... I have had these same kinds of issues for a LONG TIME, and I've tried just about everything I can think of, replacing components, like CPU, RAM even installing water cooling... But I vaguely recall issues happening after installing Armoury Crate for some reason. Did you need to uninstall Armoury Crate completely, or just make sure it isn't running?

[fcueto]

not having it running is enough to stop instabilities

[Murph_9000]

I may be encountering the same issue, also on Crosshair VIII Extreme, but it probably hits other hardware too. It certainly seems to be a software issue, with frame rates taking a big hit sometimes if AC has been running. I have a suspicion that it's possibly something to do with Aura lighting that's doing it. I've noticed that the "LightingService (32 bit)" and a "WMI Provider Host" tend to be chewing a bit of CPU (viewed in Task Manager) every time I've encountered it. It's not that noticeable in terms of CPU% on a 5950X because there are so many cores/threads, but they solidly top the chart when the system is being weird and is otherwise idle. I've been playing with restarting the LightingService when it happens, trying to see if that clears the problem. Just closing AC after it has been open doesn't seem to properly clear the problem, but I think restarting that service may help. Restarting NT services randomly isn't something I'd encourage, and can cause problems, so this is a very specific thing to this problem.

1. Win+R, services.msc
2. Scroll down to LightingService
3. Right click LightingService, select Restart
4. Aura will kinda break (animations stop, lights may drop out for a second), but then seems to recover

Resist the temptation to mess with services as a whole, unless you understand what they do. You can very easily break NT systems by disabling or restarting the wrong service. Very much at your own risk, but restarting LightingService seems to be safe enough.

I'm not 100% that actually solves the issue, or that the problem is actually in LightingService. One of possibilities is that the problem is in something else which talks to LightingService, and restarting that causes the other thing to stop misbehaving. For reference, I have been running with everything enabled for Aura Sync, and have been typically running in Rainbow mode and high Aura CPU usage enabled. The lighting runs just fine like that after a reboot, with other things behaving normally; it's only after running AC that something seems to get into a bad state.

The above are preliminary observations, I've only been properly investigating it for a couple of days.

[marti77]

I have similar problem with my crosshair VIII extreme + 5950x and its unstable even with default amd stock settings and ram at jedec standard 2133mhz.
When trying to stress test with linpack pc only stays on about 5sec and reboots and not even reset or safemode is working.
Has to manually switch off from psu.
Have been figting this issue over 6 months now and even playing games its freezing.
Just put a request to rma 5950x but i bought it second hand so hard to say if i can get a new one.
I has tried 3 different ram sticks combos and nothing seems to work and its not a gpu issue when its working 100% in another pc.
It could be the motherboard but i dont see anything that point in that direction.