New
#1
Unpredictable BSODs with different stop codes
Hey there,
For months I've been having a strange issue that I haven't really had the time to be able to fully diagnose myself - every once in a while, my PC will BSOD. The BSOD screen itself tends to look slightly corrupted, which is concerning in and of itself, but it's also throwing different stop codes at me and never cites a driver/source of the BSOD on that screen. Errors I can remember that I've gotten include IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, BAD_POOL_HEADER, EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, and possibly others. I built this PC with all new parts back in 2018 other than some of my HDDs and one of my SSDs, so I'm concerned it may be some of my hardware showing its age.
My CPU is a non-K Intel CPU (i5-8400), and for a few months I had it base clock overclocked slightly through my BIOS to try to keep up with some games I play that have become more CPU-bound over the years than GPU-bound. A little over a month ago, I changed those settings in my BIOS back to normal. The crashes appear to have lessened, but not gone away entirely, and I'll be honest that it's been happening long enough that I can't remember whether they happened before I base clock overclocked my CPU or not. In the BIOS, I do also have XMP enabled on my RAM.
My GPU is overclocked through MSI Afterburner. However, these overclocks feel important enough to my gaming performance that I haven't removed these overclocks to see if it helps because some of the more serious games I play that I have weekly group commitments in are nearly unplayable without them.
System temps appear to be fine both at idle and under load. Running Cinebench R23 does not result in a crash. The crashes happen both when idle and when under load and I have not been able to intentionally recreate the BSODs, which has made troubleshooting that much harder, as sometimes it'll happen multiple times in one night, and sometimes it won't happen for over a week.
The only thing I've been able to figure out as a potentially common denominator in these crashes is that they happen more frequently when there is either a GPU driver update available or Windows update available, no matter how small or optional the update. However, they do still happen sometimes when there's no driver update available that I can find, so I'm not certain it's that, either.
After finishing this post, I'm going to run MemTest86 and the Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool, but I wanted to get the BSOD log collector results up in case there's anything glaringly obvious in there that someone with more know-how than me could pick up on to steer me in the right direction.
My specs are as follows:
Windows 10 Pro Version 22H2 (OS Build 19045.3324)
CPU: Intel Core i5-8400 @ 2.8 GHz (6-Core)
Motherboard: Asus ROG Maximus X Hero (Wi-Fi AC)
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4-3000 CL 15 (2x8GB)
PSU: Roswell Glacier 850M 80+ Bronze
SSDs: SanDisk 500GB (can't remember model but this is my C drive), Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB
HDDs: 2x Western Digital Black 3TB, 1x Western Digital (I think this might be Blue? If not, Black) 1TB
Keyboard: SteelSeries Apex 3 RGB
Mouse: Razer Naga Pro
Webcam: Microsoft LifeCam VX-5000
Here is a link to the BSOD V2 Log Collector .zip: NOTQUANTIC-(2023-08-31_16-24-34).zip - Google Drive
Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!