Did I just kill a B650 board?

dave343

dave343

[H]ard|Gawd
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Last week I upgraded my sons PC to a 7600X, on a Gigabyte B650M-DS3H, and G.Skill 6000 C30. I also dropped in a 1tb nvme since his games were killing the 500gb he had in there. I did the fresh install of W11, AMD chipset drivers, latest NV drivers for the GPU, and all updates. I couldn’t get AMD Expo to take until I updated to the Gigabye March 14th BIOS.

My kid is super particular with his games, mods, configs etc and so he hated the fresh install and wanted the old Windows 11 SSD back in. Doesn’t matter how much explaining I did that coming from his 10600K it kinda made sense to always do a fresh install. Anyways after a day of trying to get everything back in order on the fresh install I thought fk-it I’ll just ghost his old drive over to the 1tb. Did all the DDU uninstall, and basically did the AMD chipset etc.

After that I figured we were smooth sailing as we ran some AAA games, benchmarks etc and everything was butter no issues. Then a few days later he tells me his screen is randomly going blank for a moment, and some Roblox games are super slow to the point of unplayable and the PC will sometimes reset when it freezes—weird. Temps were fine on his H100x AIO and his older TX750 PSU should be fine.
So I run Furmark, then I run Furmark CPU test, and finally I run them at the same time. No issues. Then I fire up Prime95, still no issue. So I was left scratching my head and just started using his PC as I was working from home anyways. About a 1/2 later I have a file explorer window open and it stops responding. Shortly after Firefox stops responding… and then Chrome stops, and finally I can’t move the mouse or use the keyboard. After 2 minutes the PC just resets, so wtf?

While obviously using a previous OS install is never a good idea—I know—I found it hard to believe it could be causing issues so bad the PC would reset.

Changing Expo to Jdec default didn’t help so after some hair pulling, I just pulled the stuff out and installed a B550 board with a 5600 and his older 3200 Corsair ram. No issues.

While I was randomly looking at the B650 board I noticed some scrapes on the bottom and I don’t know if I did this while installing or during its removal, but I’m curious if the issues could be related to where the damaged traces are located. The damage doesn’t look too bad…or deep, but it’s also something Gigabyte surely won’t fix. I’m also curious if the damage isn’t too bad or related to the issues, could it be related to the install, the Ram or something else? BIOS was at default settings except for the Expo. His GPU is mounted vertically using the Lian Li riser (PCIe 3.0). I didn’t set the PCIe to 3.0 in the BIOS but just 10 minutes ago he was getting 5fps on some games and so I did change the PCIe to 3.0 on the B550 and it’s smooth now.
But—sure I forgot to set that on his B650 but I also doubt that would hard lock and keep resetting his PC. And why would Furmark and Prime95 run but simple things in Windows take down the PC.

Anyways hopefully I didn’t kill this board.

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looks ok. the screw suround doesnt matter and the traces look intact. put some nail polish or even just some etape over it. the way it stops working sounds almost like a bad drive. try another fresh install on a different drive to rule it out. just do windows and a game or two.
 
My motherboard recently died but before it died it was hard locking randomly most within the first minute of booting into Windows. Shortly after, the monitor would get no signal. I swapped out every part including cpu, ram, hard drive, psu and by process of elimination it was the mb. You may have to do something similar to find the source of the problem.
 
The parts are hard to swap since I didn’t have another Zen5 board or DDR5. All the other PC’s my kids run and even mine are DDR4.
The SSD I guess I could have swapped, like back to his older Samsung Evo 500GB. The new drive is a WD SN850x, so I dismissed it might be the issue, but I’ve seen weirder things happen. Although now that I’ve stuck a B550 board in his rig with the same WD drive it’s running ok (so far 🤞).

But yes, normally I totally agree and I’d swap parts one at a time, although I would start at a fresh install of windows. Mind you after switching him to a B550 setup (from the Intel) without a re-install and (so far 🤞) having no issues maybe it wasn’t windows. Or his Windows install hated the B650 board.
 
First thing I’d do if I didn’t have parts to swap, I’d go back to a fresh install of W11 and see if you get any of these issues.

You don’t appear to have had any of these issues when you went with the fresh install. If you have no problems on the new ssd with the fresh install, you have your answer.
 
Now that he's running the B550 setup ok, I'm leaving it. I'll test the B650 parts separately and will try a fresh install of 11, try some games, leave some burn in tests going for a while. I do also wonder if the B650M-DS3H was too low end of a board to handle the G.Skill 6000 Expo kit. It was one of the cheapest B650 boards and even then it was the same price as a Asus B550 Strix Gaming Wifi II.

So the fresh install was done originally, and no games had been installed yet. It was a very, very short lived fresh installed since my kid was fighting to have his old install back with his 3yr old Windows and it's games, mods, programs etc. Since then neither the B650 board or the now B550 has seen a fresh install. The B650 setup probably saw Windows 11 fresh for maybe a few hours of up time.
 
dave343 said:
Now that he's running the B550 setup ok, I'm leaving it. I'll test the B650 parts separately and will try a fresh install of 11, try some games, leave some burn in tests going for a while. I do also wonder if the B650M-DS3H was too low end of a board to handle the G.Skill 6000 Expo kit. It was one of the cheapest B650 boards and even then it was the same price as a Asus B550 Strix Gaming Wifi II.

So the fresh install was done originally, and no games had been installed yet. It was a very, very short lived fresh installed since my kid was fighting to have his old install back with his 3yr old Windows and it's games, mods, programs etc. Since then neither the B650 board or the now B550 has seen a fresh install. The B650 setup probably saw Windows 11 fresh for maybe a few hours of up time.
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future tip: install all games mods, documents etc on a separate drive. So much easier long term.
 
pendragon1 said:
although this one might be iffy, can you get a better pic?
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This is the best I can get without buying a circuit board magnifier. Pixel 6A! (Being extra magnified by my younger kids bug magnifier 😂)

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dave343 said:
But don't many games like Minecraft and others dump stuff in the appdata folder? As well programs?
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Yes very true. In that case for that game, just do a backup of that folder. There are some tutorials walking you through but it’s easy. Copy that over to your game drive before you nuke the os. Once the os is installed copy the folder over. If it’s windows 10/11 it works.
 
dave343 said:
This is the best I can get without buying a circuit board magnifier. Pixel 6A! (Being extra magnified by my younger kids bug magnifier 😂)

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Man I’ve seen worse. I don’t think that’s the issue…


Boot a Linux live usb distro and run some benchmarks. If you had an issue with the hardware in the Linux live environment, then yes id for sure you need hun the hardware that’s causing the issue.

If not, it’s likely software.
 
yeah i think its just "paint" scratched off, the trace looks like it should be intact. clear the bios and make sure everything is at default, use one stick of ram and memtest it. if it keeps running try to update the bios and clear it again. make a new windows install usb and reload it. you could drop in his old drive/install, it will reboot a couple times and should hit the desktop no prob.
 
I’m using a Gigabyte DS3H B650 board in my new build. I don’t have hard resets aside from when running the 3DMark CPU test. I too am using a gskill 6000 cl30 and it’s worked very well so far. I’m sorry you’re having trouble with your son’s build. I hope you figure it out.
 
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