CPU: 3700X
Motherboard: Aorus B550 Elite
RAM: 8GBx4 Corsair Vengence LPX 3200
GPU: PowerColor 5700XT
PSU: Cooler Master MWE 1050 V2
Built in 2020.
Since last month, my PC started having random reboots and giving ‘Machine Check Exception’ error, similar to these:
https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/190mkn0/5950x_whea_error_18_machine_check_exception/
https://old.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/qia2e7/whea_18_critical_error_computer_goes_black_restart/
https://old.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/150m14n/pc_randomly_restarts_whealogger_id_18/
And now from the last 3 days the system doesn’t boot. When I power on the computer, all fans start spinning but keyboard and mouse LEDs don’t light up. Pressing CTRL+ALT+DEL doesn’t reboot system neither does pressing the power button for few seconds.
I suspect that motherboard has gone kaput and isn’t completing or even starting the boot process, which is why keyboard and mouse aren’t getting any signal or power from motherboard or why restart or power down functionality is working.
Before the system stopped booting, I was trying to solve the machine check exception error by updating BIOS, updating chipset drivers, changing BIOS settings etc. But now I’m thinking none of it could’ve helped because the board itself was deteriorating.
Also during that time, I would randomly get display glitches (pic below) which could only be solved by restarting the machine so I was suspecting it might be GPU that was causing the problems.
Sometimes it would show chessboard like pattern. I guess this was also because of some issue with mobo-GPU connection?
Anyway before changing the board is there anything else I can try? Changing it is a pain so I’m trying to avoid that. 😂
That’s what I thought too but as I’ve mentioned, keyboard and mouse are not getting any power from motherboard.
If it was GPU issue, those would have active lights with only monitor not getting any signal from GPU.
When the system still used to turn on properly, I’d get these in Windows’ event viewer:
Reported by component: Processor Core
Error Source: Machine Check Exception
Error Type: Cache Hierarchy Error
Processor APIC ID: This kept changing
Provider Name: Microsoft-Windows-WHEA-Logger
Event ID: 18
When I started looking up information about this error I found out it could be caused by literally anything. Faulty CPU, board, memory, PSU. Sometimes setting CPU voltage around 1.30-1.35 helped. In one case the guy replaced his custom power cables with default ones and that solved the issue.
Oh, cache hierarchy errors were decently common with Matisse too. I think this one may be your CPU my colleague hit this the other day with their ol’ 3700X. I don’t suppose you could RMA that?
That’s going to be my last resort.
I wouldn’t trust that CPU at this point if you’re reliably hitting that error code. Really sorry you’re experiencing this. I hope you get a swift replacement.
Well I’d be actually baffled if it turns out to be CPU. Short of physical or electric damage, I have never heard of a chip going bad after 4 years.
it happens often enough. Hell we’ve had the whole raptor lake episode on Intel’s side which wasn’t really confirmed until well after release.
Could have been that the CPU was always impacted and degraded in some way over time to have that error code suddenly manifest.