[November] Week 3 : And it did!

I should not have said that I should not have said that I should not have said that.

[Top Gear - Dark Souls 1/2/3 Special]

Short history lesson on my PC. It was originally built in 2018 after being discharged from the military. It has had multiple parts swap and the only original part that remains is a single stick of SSD. I only did 1 format of my boot drive during that time which means the system is pretty messed up behind the scenes with multiple CPU, GPU changes. Worse yet almost every single part was unstable or was showing issues.

CPU : My current 5950X was a piece of dogshit that couldn't maintain its base specs due to some kind of flaw. As far as I can tell it tries to use too little power and 1(or more) of the 16 cores would crash due to low power input. The solution was to give it more voltage on all cores using the curve optimizer. This kind of fixed the BSOD but now my CPU was basically overvolted.

GPU : My 3090 was an issue day 1. Under load the PC would shut off randomly. Turns out this wasn't exactly an issue with the GPU, but more so with the PSU. The power supply (Seasonic Focus Gold 750) had a flaw that it couldn't handle the power spike that the 3090 caused. A swap to a 1000W PSU solved this issue.

More recently however, I've been observing a serious increase in temps, regularly hitting 90C under load. One reason was the storage, which I'll explain later, but the other I suspect, was that the thermal paste was degrading inside that thing. Re-pasting is kinda risky and I cannot afford downtime right now.

Besides that I've been seeing these "lines" on my monitor. This is common among GPUs that had degraded due to high temps, and I fear that my GPU doesn't have much time left on it.

RAM : My ram was a disappointment from the start. It could not hold the advertised XMP profile of 3600. To hold those numbers stably, it required a whooping 1.495V, which is a dangerous amount of sustained voltage. But without that the PC would crash constantly or straight up refuse to boot.

Storage : Storage has always been a big issue, especially after starting to work with Prores LT video files. Video files would hit 500GB/h. Moreover using HDDs to edit these files would kinda defeat the performance increase that Prores brought.

My solution was to buy a second hand server grade U.2 16TB SSD. I was able to snag one on Ebay, and due to the size and PCIE requirements, It is installed in my second PCIE slot. Which is directly under my GPU and suffocating it. Also the installation was not pain free as I had to boot into linux to properly make the drive register in windows. How tf does that work?

Software : I've been using Vegas Pro 18 to edit my videos. The current version as of writing is 22 and the reason behind staying was that version 19 and up had a major UI change and I just didn't like those.

My windows however, was a much different issue. Long story short my updates would fail constantly, and I've been stuck with a fairly old version of windows 10 for a couple of years now.

...So with a boot drive that has seen multiple part changes, windows and vegas that was years behind, CPU that was overvolted, GPU that was hitting 90C and showing obvious signs of degradation, RAM that was running on insane power just to hold its advertised specs, Storage that was made with second hand parts, it was no real surprise that the system was always unstable.

However, recently I've been getting BSODs every 30min-1hour, which made me lose progress constantly, and with so many potential points of failures I was unsure which parts I needed to replace or if it even was a hardware issue in the first place.

The BSODs would always happen when editing videos, which made the problem worse since video editing uses all of these points of failures.

To troubleshoot this, I analyzed all the BSOD crash logs using WhoCrashed, and to my dismay all the crashes had a different error code. So that didn't really help.

I spent a few days trying to fix this, and during this time I realized that some downloaded files were getting corrupted, which was not stored in the jury rigged SSD mentioned, so I suspected something was off with the RAM. A quick RAM test with memtest86 later, I have never seen so many errors on 2 sticks of ram before. The test didn't even finish and I was seeing hundreds of errors.

So I disabled XMP and let my sticks run at 2400, did an overnight RAM test, and thankfully it had no errors. The speed decrease sucks but I'd rather have DDR3 speeds than a system that crashes every 30 mins.

DDR4 and AM4 for that matter is a dead end upgrade path and I'm not planning on investing on it any further. After this video finishes I'll upgrade my PC to a 9950x3D + AM5 + DDR5 + maybe 5090 and do a fresh install of windows 11, but for now my dogshit PC gets to live another day.

Thank you very much for reading my rambling, and thank you for your support!