msi Z97 U3 PLUS - Intel Core i7-4770 CPU BSOD

[eddyc]

Hello all,

 

After some pointers here if anyone has any suggestions.

 

I have a friends PC that I said I would look at and am running out of steam \ ideas!

 

Before I start, they bought this PC 4 or so years ago from an independent one man band and it has never worked.

The company that build it have taken it back several times for months on end and have never been able to provide a solution.

They have had the PC sat in a cupboard for the last two years but have never been able to use it as its too unstable.

 

The PC is build up of;

Msi Z97 U3 Plus motherboard

Intel ® Core ™ i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40Ghz

16GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM (4x 4GB Corsair sticks)

256GB Samsung EVO 840 SSD

Windows 10 Home Edition

 

The PC seems to be fine - I have ran HeavyLoad and various applications on it without an issue, however as soon as you launch Google Chrome the PC blue screens (whea_uncorrectable_error) or just locks up with whatever you have open on screen. Some times this is instant and other times it can be after some time of using Chrome. It does however only seem to be when using Google Chrome.

 

I have tried various Malware scans. Even a fresh install of Windows on a brand new drive to the same end.

 

I have tested all of the memory on a stick by stick basis using the Windows Memory Diagnostics Tool and all 4 sticks seem to pass, however when you have all 4 sticks in and run the tool, it says that "Hardware problems were detected. To identify and repair these problems please contact the computer manufacturer" I thought then it could be a duff DIMM on the motherboard so have tried using the PC with a single stick (which seems fine but varies depending on which of the 4 slots are used). However as soon as you get upto 2 or more sticks the issue is constant again.

 

I believe this could be motherboard \ onboard graphics related but am running out of suggestions. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

 

At this stage my friend is saying to bin the PC and buy a new one but they have invested heavily into it - I said I would try to fix it as a favour so would love to get it up and running for them.

 

Ed

[synaesthesia]

MSI.

The amount of trouble I've had with their crappy boards has been amusing. I thought I'd give them ago on my last system (core i5 3rd gen) and found it so generally intermittently unreliable it wasn't funny. I was reasonably sure it was down to RAM, that I believe was Corsair Dominator. It got considerably more reliable using cheap rubbish Kingston stuff but the board itself died and ended up needing a full replacement. Glad to see the back of the thing.

[MrEprise]

When I started building PCs in the late 90s, I felt MSI's boards were as good as their competitors and good value for money so used them for a few builds until up to about 2006 or 07 when I built 2 PCs which exhibited a number of issues. First one I built I used a high-end MSI board which failed after 2 weeks of use. Assuming this was a one-off (replacement board worked okay) I built a second PC again using a not particularly cheap MSI board. This one was the final straw as I had to update the BIOS in order to enable most of the front panel header pins before they would work (power switch pins worked okay though oddly). This put me off their stuff since as an end-user, I felt I shouldn't be their QA dept for stuff that should have been tested and fixed before going out the door.

 

Since then I've used a combination of Gigabyte (mostly), Biostar and occasionally ASUS. I've rarely had issues with these and have never looked back.

 

EDIT: Actually I should also add that one of my bosses at work a while ago built a PC around an MSI board. He ended up sending it back as it wouldn't detect any SATA drives despite trying all sorts of different components and cables. I think he ended up with an ASUS board in the end which worked flawlessly out of the box.

Edited November 9, 2017 by MrEprise

[difinity]

Update to the latest BIOS if you haven't already and check the memory timings.

Is the memory on the compatibility list ? https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/Z97-U3-PLUS#support-mem

[eddyc]

Tried the BIOS update to no avail.

 

Replaced the board with one from another manufacturer and we are away!

 

Thanks for the replies and help!

[chazzy2501]

too late now but disable multicore enhancement, it is sometimes enabled when you use XMP for your memory and allows a slight OC that can prove unstable in certain workloads. (yes on non-k CPUs).