Had a doozy in this week. Guy bought a £6000 gaming rig (4090/7200MHz RAM/4TB NVMe a gogo) and its not worked right for over a year. He took it to two places to try to get it sorted, the boutique that built it didnt want to know.
So muggins here was the last resort. I did all the usual stuff, ram swaps, two stick or 4 sticks, XMP or no XMP, BIOS updates, NVMe and SATA swaps but I could not get Windows 11 to install without it crashing or BSOD. Windows 10 would go on but not work right.
I'd spent a day at this point trying to work it out. Thinking it may be a bad motherboard...it's a £650 Asus! I didnt have a spare 1700 socket CPU laying around but then I had an idea. I switched off the efficiency cores and all the Performance cores bar two.
Windows 11 installed straight away. I managed to get a stableish build on. I then added more cores and the results then got worse and worse. AIDA stresstest kept crapping out.
So I told the guy it was the CPU. He then said "shall i just get AMD, I'm told AMD are better!" No!!!! I replaied...you've spent enough and this would mean new CPU/board and most likely ram. I told him to get a 14700K instead. The rub here is he told me that "his Son just plays Fortnight on it...but his friends told him he needed all this!" WTF???!!!???
Anyway he turned up with a 14700K and...it worked fine and stable. One working machine. I told him to see if he could RMA the 13900KS and then sell the replacement if he got it.
At least we got a working machine. Son is please and so is he. I hate boutique builds! Never had a CPU with bad cores before in 25 years of building PCs.
So muggins here was the last resort. I did all the usual stuff, ram swaps, two stick or 4 sticks, XMP or no XMP, BIOS updates, NVMe and SATA swaps but I could not get Windows 11 to install without it crashing or BSOD. Windows 10 would go on but not work right.
I'd spent a day at this point trying to work it out. Thinking it may be a bad motherboard...it's a £650 Asus! I didnt have a spare 1700 socket CPU laying around but then I had an idea. I switched off the efficiency cores and all the Performance cores bar two.
Windows 11 installed straight away. I managed to get a stableish build on. I then added more cores and the results then got worse and worse. AIDA stresstest kept crapping out.
So I told the guy it was the CPU. He then said "shall i just get AMD, I'm told AMD are better!" No!!!! I replaied...you've spent enough and this would mean new CPU/board and most likely ram. I told him to get a 14700K instead. The rub here is he told me that "his Son just plays Fortnight on it...but his friends told him he needed all this!" WTF???!!!???
Anyway he turned up with a 14700K and...it worked fine and stable. One working machine. I told him to see if he could RMA the 13900KS and then sell the replacement if he got it.
At least we got a working machine. Son is please and so is he. I hate boutique builds! Never had a CPU with bad cores before in 25 years of building PCs.