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Hello everyone! I just put an order in for a new i5 9600k.

I'm finally upgrading from a 2500k and an Asus z68 MB There's so many different motherboard models/chipsets and ram speeds/timings that I don't know what to get!

Right now, I'm looking at an Asus Z390 MB (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HM3FMRB)
I'm looking for something that someone would hope to be good for a long time.

For ram, I was thinking 2x8gb sticks. I dont care about LEDs, but what speed/cas timings should I aim for? C15 is more expensive than c16. There's also C14. I'm not sure what the pice/performance ration is. I was thinking C15 and ddr4 3200.

For reference the rest of my build is a Nvidia 1080, seasonic 550w Gold rated PSU, Crusial mx500 1Tb ssd, Corsair H80 CPU cooler. All purchased last year.

Thanks for any assistance.

3200 C15 is a bit of an odd duck - it takes B-die to get there, but it looks like it's the very slowest B-die bin. 3200 C14 is barely more expensive (if at all), and 3200 C16 / 3000 C15 are substantially cheaper. I'd probably go for 3200 C16.

What's your monitor's refresh rate? If it's 144 and you expect your GPU will usually be able to get into that ballpark, that may be a good argument for B-die RAM (3200 C14 or 3466 C16).

gcrosier wrote:

For ram, I was thinking 2x8gb sticks. I dont care about LEDs, but what speed/cas timings should I aim for? C15 is more expensive than c16. There's also C14. I'm not sure what the pice/performance ration is. I was thinking C15 and ddr4 3200.

RAM prices do not seem to be going down soon, unfortunately. Samsung B-die is supposed to be the best and is the only to achieve 3200 C14, but I'm not sure the performance gains are really worth it, especially if the difference comes at $50 or more. Your idea of getting 3200C15 is probably a good compromise, but I don't know if there are significant gains to be had with Intel by C14.

Essentially, the difference between a $130 C16 kit and a $200+ C14 kit only matters to the extent that (a) you have that money and (b) you don't plan on putting it towards another component (bigger SSD, better motherboard etc).

I would go for good quality RAM not for performance reasons but because RAM errors/failures are some of the most annoying hardware problems to discover and debug. Also more prevalent than what you think. For what it's worth, I'm using 3000C15 but I regret not buying B-die.

I agree that PC4-25600 with CAS 16 seems to be a better value than faster RAM. Memory prices have definitely been trending downward in the past month and a half.
$130 2x8 GiB PC4-25600 Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 (DDR4-3200, 16-18-18-36, 1.35 V)
$120 2x8 GiB PC4-25600 G.Skill F4-3200C16D-16GTZKW (DDR4-3200, 16-18-18-38, 1.35 V)

Thank you for the assistance on the Ram choices! How does my choice for a motherboard look?

Not bad, but possibly more expensive than it needs to be. Are there any particular features you're looking for in a motherboard?

Feature wise, I'm not picky. I can totally go with a cheaper motherboard. The only thing I want really, is longevity and stability with overclocking potential. This TUF model might be better with that (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HM6ZC9D), since they have a 5 year warranty.

I dont care about RGB LEDs on my motherboard (my case has no windows). I dont care about Wifi (but I might in the future). I'd rather have the z390 chipset, since it's newer (no specific reason why).

I have some bluetooth things, so that's a feature that I wouldn't mind being built into the motherboard

I'm an Asus mobo buyer/user, primarily, but I don't like the TUF series. They cheap out on the NIC and audio, and sometimes ports. I like to start at the Prime/Pro line, and work up to the first ROG level, if necessary. I wanted mATX last time I went Intel, and it was Kaby Lake era, so ROG Z270G for me. I wanted mATX with Ryzen also, but it wasn't happening without what I considered compromises, so I went ROG X370-F. 6 months prior I went Prime X370-PRO and while physically much uglier than the ROG, they are practically the same board and they even use the same UEFI.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Hynix RAM, btw. No need for b-die Samsung. This isn't Ryzen. 3200 is pretty standard and affordable these days.

MOSFET wrote:

I'm an Asus mobo buyer/user, primarily, but I don't like the TUF series. They cheap out on the NIC and audio, and sometimes ports. I like to start at the Prime/Pro line, and work up to the first ROG level, if necessary.

Yes, big fan of Asus Pro series here too. My M5A99FX Pro R2.0 has been flawless. That said, it's a pretty old motherboard at this point (4+ years), so I'm not sure how relevant that is to the current product lineup.

Thanks everyone! Parts ordered.

Everything is installed! I got into windows, driver updates happened. (Need to reactivate windows 10 but whatever.)

And now... BSODs machine check exception errors, and that's with the ram not set XMP. If I try to overclock, I get clock watchdog timeout BSODs.

Going to back everything up and try a fresh windows installation, that could be the culprit, safe mode seems stable.

So... First shot with reinstalling Windows, got that odd clock error. Restarted and reset bios. Tried again and it worked, for about an hour and a half and i got another machine check exception. Not sure what to do, I'm guessing something is bad, but what?

Not sure if you have seen these, but if not they may help. It sounds like this is caused by a misbehaving driver causing CPU thread contention.

https://www.reviversoft.com/blog/2013/0 ... g-timeout/

https://www.drivereasy.com/knowledge/so ... g-timeout/

https://www.wintips.org/how-to-fix-bsod ... indows-10/

Try running memtest for at least two passes to see if the memory and motherboard are willing to dance. You also might want to unplug all extra peripherals as well.

Krogoth wrote:

Try running memtest for at least two passes to see if the memory and motherboard are willing to dance. You also might want to unplug all extra peripherals as well.

Or just check for defective RAM. Defective RAM happens and causes BSODs. There are degrees of quality-control from the factory, but if the RAM were mishandled (static shock, big drops, jumbled around in the box during shipping), then the RAM could have been damaged before it got to you. So its worth checking if your RAM (or really, any component) is busted.

dragontamer5788 wrote:

Krogoth wrote:

Try running memtest for at least two passes to see if the memory and motherboard are willing to dance. You also might want to unplug all extra peripherals as well.

Or just check for defective RAM. ...

Err... isn't that the point of running memtest?

so far today, only 1 BSOD and it was when we weren't home, came home to the BSOD. Just played AC Odyssey for ~45 minutes without issues (can play on Ultra High 1080p and average 60fps on the benchmark).

I noticed that none of my monitoring software is detecting the GPU fans, and they are spinning constantly now... Not sure what to make of that.

reseated my gpu and now the fan speeds are being shown in monitoring software, also not spinning up to 100% now.

I have a spare flash drive at work, going to bring it home and load up memtest on it and test my memory

gcrosier wrote:

reseated my gpu and now the fan speeds are being shown in monitoring software, also not spinning up to 100% now.

Sounds like there may be some alignment issues between your case and the motherboard. If the GPU doesn't seem to be sitting completely level in the slot, you may be able to improve the situation by gently bending the tab at the top of the PCI slot bracket (the part the screw goes through to secure the card) slightly.

Thanks I'll take a look at that.

I've been looking at the Minidump files, and found this... Not sure what this means. I've read it's a bad Intel CPU Driver install?

FAILURE_ID_HASH_STRING: km:0x9c_genuineintel_intelppm!mwaitidle

FAILURE_ID_HASH: {b437bf01-d2c2-2e2f-fa19-a64dea7afbde}

just brew it! wrote:

dragontamer5788 wrote:

Krogoth wrote:

Try running memtest for at least two passes to see if the memory and motherboard are willing to dance. You also might want to unplug all extra peripherals as well.

Or just check for defective RAM. ...

Err... isn't that the point of running memtest?

Technically to check and see if memory and/or motherboard/memory controller are at fault.

Krogoth wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

dragontamer5788 wrote:

Or just check for defective RAM. ...

Err... isn't that the point of running memtest?

Technically to check and see if memory and/or motherboard/memory controller are at fault.

Something must be faulty, right now, i can't overclock my cpu at all... I just set the cpu to 4500, from default 4300, and get clock watchdog timeouts. It seems stable now, when I'm not overclocking. Either Ram or Motherboard must be faulty somewhere...

Unless it's just poor silicon lottery? But then I'd expect it to not be a K series processor if it couldnt overclock even a tiny amount.

Memtest86 full suite 4 pass tests. 1 error. I'm running more tests, to see if there's any repeatable errors.

gcrosier wrote:

Memtest86 full suite 4 pass tests. 1 error. I'm running more tests, to see if there's any repeatable errors.

Unless you got really unlucky (cosmic ray strike on one of the DRAM chips at exactly the wrong moment) you've got problems in your RAM subsystem somewhere (marginal DIMM, memory controller, or memory bus on the motherboard). 1 error in 4 passes is pretty unlikely if everything's good.

Ok, here's the full Memtest 86 report from my overnight 20 pass.


EFI Specifications 2.60
System
Manufacturer System manufacturer
Product Name System Product Name
Version System Version
Serial Number System Serial Number
BIOS
Vendor American Megatrends Inc.
Version 0602
Release Date 10/19/2018
Baseboard
Manufacturer ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
Product Name ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING
Version Rev 1.xx
Serial Number 180835332401592
CPU Type Intel Core i5-9600K @ 3.70GHz
CPU Clock 3743 MHz [Turbo: 4422.6 MHz]
# Logical Processors 6
L1 Cache 4 x 64K (238113 MB/s)
L2 Cache 4 x 256K (81866 MB/s)
L3 Cache 9216K (45160 MB/s)
Memory 16315M (22401 MB/s)
DIMM Slot #0 8GB DDR4 PC4-25600
G-Skill / F4-3200C15-8GVR
3200 MHz
DIMM Slot #1 8GB DDR4 PC4-25600
G-Skill / F4-3200C15-8GVR
3200 MHz
Result summary
Test Start Time 2018-11-26 20:59:17
Elapsed Time 14:52:19
Memory Range Tested 0x0 - 46E000000 (18144MB)
CPU Selection Mode Parallel (All CPUs)
ECC Polling Enabled
# Tests Passed 224/240 (93%)
Lowest Error Address 0x303D09F10 (12349MB)
Highest Error Address 0x303D09F10 (12349MB)
Bits in Error Mask 0000000000080000
Bits in Error 1
Max Contiguous Errors 1
Test # Tests Passed Errors
Test 0 [Address test, walking ones, 1 CPU] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 1 [Address test, own address, 1 CPU] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 2 [Address test, own address] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 3 [Moving inversions, ones & zeroes] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 4 [Moving inversions, 8-bit pattern] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 5 [Moving inversions, random pattern] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 6 [Block move, 64-byte blocks] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 7 [Moving inversions, 32-bit pattern] 14/20 (70%) 6
Test 8 [Random number sequence] 12/20 (60%) 10
Test 9 [Modulo 20, ones & zeros] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 10 [Bit fade test, 2 patterns, 1 CPU] 20/20 (100%) 0
Test 13 [Hammer test] 18/20 (90%) 2
Last 10 Errors
[Data Error] Test: 7, CPU: 3, Address: 303D09F10, Expected: 00008000, Actual: 00088000

Definitely defective RAM.

Start the RMA process.

EDIT: I guess most likely defective RAM, since it could be the CPU (memory controllers are on CPU now), or the Motherboard. But I'm going to lean towards "bad RAM" in this case.

Yup! That's what I was thinking.

So, new RAM came in last night and passed 8 passes of memtest86 full test suite. Hope that partially solves my problems. I'll have time tonight to run some prime95 to further stress test.

Glad to hear things are (hopefully) on the mend here. There's few things that are more frustrating than a new build that just won't behave!