Hi.

Recently the weather has been very hot in the UK, which has been very nice. Except my house is like an oven and inside that oven is my PC. A few days into this heat wave and my PC started playing up. Being sure that this couldn't have been an coincidence I threw out my CPU air cooler for some fancy block water cooling. However after installing this cooler today (another really hot day) the problems still persist.

The issue seems to happen the most when I run intensive PROGRAMS, such as CS:GO at 1280×720 and 400 fps so I am convinced it is some sort of heating issue however I'm shocked that my new water cooling has had no impact compared to my previous budget CPU air cooling. In the CS:GO example the GAME will tend to run fine for some time, maybe 20 minutes or so and then suddenly my mouse will stop responding for a few seconds and I'll hear the Windows device disconnected and device CONNECTED bleeps. It seems to happen a couple of times at first, then gets more frequent. Sometimes the mouse will stay disconnected until I physically remove it from the port and plug it back in.

It's not restricted to my mouse, it also happens to my keyboard and my headset although less frequently (stab in the dark but I'm guessing these devices have less traffic/input/output (or whatever you would call it) over the ports than the mouse does). Might be important to note also these are the only USB devices I use and they are all SteelSeries and I have some UI tool that they all come under installed from SteelSeries called SteelSeries Engine 3... Doubt that has any bearing on this issue though.

Not only does the above happen but my frames will suddenly drop to around 50 mark but spike down and up (+/- say 20 frames) wildly. However when this happens it doesn't feel like a 50fps experience as though it would if I'd capped it to 50fps under normal operation as the display is much jerkier and tears more. The temp readings of my GPU and system temp stay constantly nice and cool throughout however I'm not sure of my actual CPU temp. The reason being I am getting different readings from different monitor software. Please take a look at temps.png attached which shows a 70 degrees reading on Speccy and a cool 50 degrees reading on the Ryzen tool. These were taken immediately after boot. Since installing the water cooling today I have installed the Ryzen program to check out the temps and it has stayed consistently between 45-55 degrees under all loads.

Also my the system temp reading on Speccy in the image was 45 degrees yet my mobo LED was showing 62 degrees. Worth noting too that before the water cooling it was not uncommon for me to see the LEDs display 85+ degrees and yet before this heat wave the system seemed to be running OK despite this. With the water cooling I installed I have not seen the LEDs go over 68.

My questions are these:
Why are the temp readings so odd and don't match between programs?
Are the USB disconnections and frame drops symptoms of overheating?
Could there be another issue rather than temp at play?
How do I diagnose/resolve the issues?

Any help any one can provide or any thoughts/suggestions would be hugely appreciated because I'm really getting quite fed up with the issues. As you can see from the specs in the attached text document I've spent a lot of money on the PC, and I didn't have all that much money to begin with , but the *censored* thing just keeps causing me headaches.

Thanks to anyone who made it through my ramblings and ravings to here.

Cheers,
Matt Shandy,
Some more detail will help.
Is this the same computer you had last three years ago?
Have you recently made changes? Harare? Software?
Hey Geek.

The system is new excluding the PSU, and two storage drives plus the Windows (10 - 64bit) installation. I hadn't made any changes to hardware before it started happening. I recall that when it happened I was searching to see if any new Windows updates had been installed as I hadn't changed anything that I could remember doing.

The problems only seem to occur during and after heavy load - It doesn't seem to return to normal even when I remove load, I have to reboot. (I've had my system on for a couple of hours since boot and done nothing much but browse this forum and had no issues). Also I sometimes just boot and watch a Twitch stream for the better half of a day with no issues.

The only thing that I can think is the hot weather we've had recently. The hardware is pretty clean inside and I've checked the connections that are easy to get at. Usually what will happen is that I'm playing a game for some time then the mouse/keyboard/headset will start messing up at first then, perhaps after joining the next game or something, my frames will drop as though the system is allowing the GPU to finish it's task and then when it goes under relatively low load it will throttle it from going back to high load - or maybe this is a coincidence?

I realise I'm not being much help here. Anything you can think of for me to check or get you some more info on?

Thanks again.

Further logs attached. Hmm...
Also bios temp of CPU is consistent with the low values given by the Ryzen program, so maybe temp is not an issue? Just seems weird that it only happens under load. I sometimes take the PC to friends places in the backseat of my car. I've tried messing about with bios power management settings like disabling cool n quiet, no bios OC etc. but nothing I've changed has had an impact so far. I don't think the bios version is the latest but it's been the same version since I built the system and I've used the PC for the better part of a year without this issue.

Just ran a virus scan on SSD (C:) (Windows installation drive) with nothing found. I'll run a scan on the HDDs overnight also.

Also when the mouse disconnects the little LED display on the side still shows up, so it's drawing power from the USB but the logo LED will sometimes turn off, sometimes not. As mentioned most of the time the signal is only disconnected for a few moments, occasionally though I have to unplug it physically and plug it back in for it to kick back in. Tried another mouse yet ? ?Hi Patio.

As of yet no I haven't tried a new mouse. I will try a different one, but the issue is also affecting my other USB devices (keyboard + headset) plus the simultaneous issues with the fps drop.

Maybe some progress as got a BSOD just now, I don't know if this is related to the on-going issues, the changes I made in bios (disabled virtualisation and some power management options), or something unrelated. Seems the error occurred in ntoskrnl.exe and bug check string is IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. I just tried to attach the dump file but my system is claiming I don't have permissions. (Odd in itself as my Windows user account states Admin and the default Admin group has full permissions over the file ACCORDING to the properties).

Any ideas?
Thanks!