Hey all,
I've been dealing with an intermittent issue for the past couple of months, sometimes I think I've fixed it, but so far it's always come back over about the past 3 months.
Basically, my PC runs perfectly 99% of the time, games very well, crushes benchmarks, is stable as a rock (except for in certain scenarios - which we'll get to), and all around great.
However, I run into issues at or near idle with the CPU. I get a complete hard freeze after about 10-30 minutes of idle or light loads (YouTube, browsing the web, chatting on Discord, etc.). Hard freeze meaning a complete lock up, no BSOD, no warnings or error messages, just a complete lock up including KB+M, even the reset button doesn't work - I have to hold down the power button to shut down completely. It will not unfreeze itself or automatically reboot no matter how long I let it sit. Event Log gives me an abnormal reboot error afterwards, but nothing unusual up to and including the freeze itself. This does NOT happen at all under any significant load, whether it's gaming, rendering, benchmarking, etc. - the system is perfectly stable at all times under load. I have completely cleared all overclocks and other UEFI customizations and gone back to bone stock and the issue persists. It is not the easiest thing in the world to effectively reproduce - I kind of just have to do boring light load applications until it decides to rear its head. Like I said, most times within 10-30 minutes.
I thought maybe I had my Vcore set too low, adjusted that, no good. Disabled C-states, same thing. The only stupid fix I've found to be 100% effective (so far) is setting the power management options in Windows to never allow the CPU below 100% state, which is pretty annoying since I'm pushing constant max voltage and cannot take advantage of power saving features as well as potentially shortening the life of my CPU.
Specs for reference:
Maximus X Hero (Wifi AC)
i7 8700k
32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB @ 3600 XMP
EVGA 1080ti SC Black Edition Gaming
Those are the important bits, the whole thing is cooled by an EK-FG liquid cooling loop.
My latest attempt at a fix was to upgrade to BIOS 1704, since it had mention of CPU Microcode updates, but the problem arguably got worse or at best stayed the same. HOWEVER, I noticed that the issue *may* have started around the time we got BIOS 1602, the one with 9x00 processor support. With that in mind, I actually rolled back to BIOS 1401, the one just previous to 1602 and so far I *think* the problem might be solved.
If anyone else has had this issue and come up with a different solution, let me know. Any other advice is appreciated. As I said, this issue is not the easiest to reproduce, so I'm not 100% convinced that the 1401 downgrade has it fixed, but I'm confident.
I will report back in a couple of days as well in case anyone comes here with the same issue.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
