Sudden system freezes. No BSOD

Lenticular said:

Hi AndreTen. I struggled a bit with attaching the cooler as the backplate had come loose and the screws couldn't reach the holes. Eventually found a way to keep the plate in place, which made the process simple. I have no idea whether I applied too much force during this process. How much is too much? Once I managed to get the screws to reach, I screwed them in a little bit at a time, jumping diagonally between them, until they bottomed out and immediately stopped. What is the danger here? What might I have done wrong? Am I not supposed to bottom out the screws, and if not, how do I get the heatsink level with the CPU?

Thanks for taking the time to look through the logs, philc. If it happpens to be contamination, can you say anything about the chances of this problem reappearing? I hate having the feeling that my computer will lock up at any moment. Also, should it happen again, what would you recommend I do?

Sometimes (very rare condition) you can damage motherboard (reversible most of the time), if applying to much power with heatsink screws. You can try to release them a bit, but think this is not the issue from how you described it.

If you have to fiddle too much when attaching heat sink, TIM paste can easily be disturbed and may have to be replaced or would take some time (and heat) to spread out properly. In any case, TIM paste requires some time to "settle". I never overclock same day a cooler or TIM is replaced, only couple of days of running or after a short "torture test".

Lenticular said:

Alright AndreTen, I'll keep this in mind. Thanks for the insight.

Hi CountMike. Attaching the cooler was definitely not the smoothest process, and I had to lift it back off the CPU once due to the backplate problem. Would you recommend replacing the thermal paste? Would this potentially disturbed TIM lead to issues that something like HWMonitor would not have picked up? I saw no abnormal temperatures before either of the freezes.

Regarding overclocking, I reset BIOS back to optimized defaults and still had at least one more freeze. I've been running XMP1 now for two days without problem. Thanks for the insight about thermal paste settling in. I'll keep this in mind if I ever get more into overclocking.

As that's a Ryzen system, HW Info https://www.hwinfo.com/download/ would give you more accurate and detailed readings.
Something like this.

Temperature can jump unexpectedly and in extreme cases faster than SW can read and inner sensor is much faster that polling frequency of SW and built in sensor can shut it down before you notice. I'm not saying that heat is the sure reason but in any case is preferable to be best possible.
RAM is also a possible cause. I had two sticks of same one in my other MB Asus Prime x370 Pro and after a lot of problems I found that one of them was partially malfunctioning. Maybe you should check yours although my was throwing BSODs, not locking up. Pls. check also RAM position, I believe it's supposed to be in A2 and B2 slots but check manual anyway.
You also have an "X" model CPU on 4xx chipset and BIOS should have options for XFR and PBO (Performance Boost Optimization) that makes CPU overclocking practically unnecessary, maybe within few % of full OC.
Speaking of BIOS, do you have last version ?

SW = SoftWare.
Gonna have to look thru manual for your MB. in mine it means cutting off half the cores, slightly increases single core performance but I haven't seen and good from it.
For testing memory Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool
Also this one for testing in windows: MemTest: RAM reliability tester for Windows