there it is I have a problem I just
updated the BIOS on my workstation and ever since I did it's been randomly
shutting off just while I'm not doing anything and while normally that's the
sort of thing that I would troubleshoot myself I have another problem and that
is that if I don't leave to start my vacation in the next 3 minutes my wife
is going to absolutely murder me
so we're going to call in the Cavalry here dialing a for
Anthony uh Hey Anthony uh
hello can you fix something for me maybe
okay cool my computer's turning off and I got to
go man I just got back from vacation and
I'm already doing tech support well hey
why not come along for the ride and I'll show you my method for troubleshooting
barely any information to go off of right after this information for our
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hulman minus tells me that he updated the BIOS in order to upgrade to Windows
11 and the computer's been shutting off randomly ever since doesn't matter what
he's doing even absolutely nothing let's see if we can track down the issue now
the first rule of thumb when doing any kind of troubleshooting always check the
most basic Solutions first so we'll start with the wall power and um H
actually he's got a UPS down here and I don't think anything else has been
turning off randomly like the TV still got power from what he told me so that's
probably not going to be our problem that leaves us to the
cables which well I'm going to have a hard time
getting in under there and you're not going to be able to see that either uh
because not only is it kind of dark but
the TV is also covering it all up but it looks
like the 8 pin 12volt connector looks like it's okay actually there's multiple
there and they both look like they're down all the way and the 24 pin ATX
connector is also pretty solid there so I don't think
that's our problem either now the system has a Threadripper CPU and sometimes
over toring the retention mechanism can flatten out the socket's pins so that
the CPU is not making contact which can make for a no power on but that doesn't
match the description of the issue where it's happening even when the system is
idle and besides I don't think I'm going to be able to open this thing up without
some help and I'd really rather not do that for now we'll fire it up and move
on maybe we'll get lucky first we'll open up a system monitoring tool like HW
info and see what our temperatures and voltages look like and we'll also load up task manager to see if any processes
are running wild and check to make sure that there's nothing weird showing up in
the startup items CPU usage looks okay to me right
now we're at 3% with uh only a few things actually being used right now
you've got OBS running and uh I guess lonus is doing some idle mining which is
fine as long as you are not specifically using your GPU for that as for the
temperatures they look okay they're a little high but at the same time we've
got a GPU doing idle mining on a closed
loop like this or it's not really a closed loop but like it's sharing the
cooling between the CPU and GPU and the CPU is currently idling it around uh in
the 40s 50s or 60s depending on what's Happening normally depending on the CPU
the enclosure and the cooling you have on your system it'll usually hover
around 30 or 40 somewhere in there as it is right now I'm not concerned about The
Thermals at all it seems perfectly fine to me yeah that's not even all that hot
the hot spot temperatures in the 60s so this cooling setup is definitely enough
we'll have to find something else that might be the cause of the problem we'll keep these tools open for now so we can
keep monitoring it as we use the computer that way if anything does
happen we can kind of be tipped off about it before it inevitably shuts down
before we move on we should look at the voltages now something to be and bind
about software reported CPU voltages is that they're not always correct they can
change more quickly than they update on screen so take them with some salt it's
also worth remembering that CPU core voltage will go higher or lower
depending on the core clocks and what the CPU is doing thanks to load likee
calibration a feature that tries to keep the CPU from under or overshooting its
voltage range and crashing or potentially taking damage over time this
throws a lot of people for a loop because even if you set the voltage
manually in the BIOS it's not guaranteed you're going to get that voltage under
any circumstances now this is an overclocked Threadripper 3000 so I
can't really expect any specific voltage range but I think usually if it's in a
low power State you can go from 0.6 all the way up to around 1.4 or more
volts depending on the load and while nothing stands out to me right now this
is one of the potential culprits for a random blue screen or power off so it's
worth keeping an eye on next it's time to see what Windows recorded last time
the PC unexpectedly powered off using Event Viewer this is built into Windows
just right click on the startup button and go up to Event Viewer here or you
can access it by typing this on the command prompt if you're ever really
stuck this particular version of Event Viewer has been around since Windows
2000 and is basically unchanged even Windows 11 we'll head over to Windows
logs and then system now by default this is sorted by date and time so we'll
scroll down to the last time we know what happened and see what Windows sees
now I actually already see some things here uh so that's interesting but you can
actually tell when Windows was shut down big gap in time followed by three event
log items when the service is restarted and if there was a blue screen you'll
see some bug check items labeled as critical as well you can use these items
to see the blue screens error code which you can then use to narrow things down
via Google this PC isn't blue screening so we don't have any bug checks well let
us see what else is happening at the time went down and it looks like we have
a bunch of acpi events here
these are related to power management and that's interesting remember what I
said about voltages earlier we might have just found some evidence for it and
by the way you'll notice that there are a lot of items in the event log just in
general so how do I know that what I'm looking at is what I'm supposed to look
at well informational stuff like these things here are usually not that useful
unless you're trying to track down something very specific and if you've been fixing Windows PCS for long enough
you'll know that some these uh distributed Comm things are usually just
there on a fresh install and they're entirely benign if you do want to know
what exactly these are referring to though you can copy the string of letters and numbers and search it online
or if you're feeling adventurous in the registry this particular one is for
immersive shell not exactly exciting or
relevant to what we're doing but knowing how to do this can be useful for
tracking down misbehaving drivers and services and just knowing about it will
help you if a scammer ever tries to convince you Windows is broken by showing you these errors it's a pretty
common trap coming back to our main issue we've got a candidate for the
problem but we should also check the application log to see if anything wears
going on there this is where things like app crashes go and while these don't
usually coincide with Windows issues if something specific keeps happening at
the same time as a recurring problem it could be related now it doesn't look
like there's any patterns showing up here here so we can rule this out for
now the security logs aren't usually relevant on single user PCS but they can
show you when you've logged in when you've used stored credentials and so on
useful if you suspect you've been hacked or if there's a problem with Windows log
on but it's not what we're after setup
on the other hand are related to Windows updates and a failed or broken Windows
update can sometimes do what we're seeing Al be usually with a reboot
instead of a shutdown as expected most of this is unremarkable information
about which updates have been installed when but a broken update or Windows
update service will show errors here for now our best lead is the power
management situation by default modern CPUs will enter a low power State when
they're not in use called c-states not to be confused with s- States like
sleeper hibernation these are like the performance oriented P States you might
already be familiar with in the form of turbo boost where the CPU will wrap up
its performance in response to load C states are just in the opposite
direction now depending on the state the
system might turn off some parts of the CPU or Park inactive cores to
significantly reduce power consumption and the voltage supplied to the cores
and therefore the CPU you can see where I'm going with this right but this is a
desktop PC so idle power consumption isn't a major concern therefore let's
try turning off C states to do that we'll restart into the BIOS and to do
that first I need to stop all of these logging programs and restart the system
oh I probably shouldn't have done that while lonus was still like doing stuff
but oh well this is how you get into the BIOS
usually sometimes you can get into it with F2 and you can get into it through
Windows as well if you hold shift while clicking on restart then using the
advanced options uh function to select UEFI firmware settings but uh we didn't
do that and so I have to mash
delete from here we're going to look for C States now some bioses like ASUS's
lets you use the search function which we will use but sometimes you'll find it
in uh like CPU configuration under Advanced or uh sometimes you'll find it
in like power management configuration
uh for now we'll just hit F9 to do search and do
cstate and it is enabled sometimes you'll see two of them one for Global
cstate control and one for c1e or enhanced halt uh if we had that here we
would disable it as well for now let's go ahead and disable C States hit uh F10
doesn't work from here okay so F10 to save and reset that's pretty normal
and okay if F10 doesn't work on your BIOS for Save and reset you can just go
to the um exit screen and it'll ask you
if you want to save usually now that we've
rebooted how can we know that this
worked we can't we can't really test for a random power off event so we'll just
need to wait I'll let it go for a few days and then we'll come back to it now
thankfully I've got my water bottle from LTD store.com to keep my drink cold till
then I'll just add a little bit of ice every now and then all right let's take
a look it's still powered on that's a good sign let's see the event
log pixel refresher I do not care about you I want to see Windows I don't see
any of those acpi events that's a good sign that's
really good I think we're good this was
happening multiple times per day before and it's been a few days now and it's
still chugging along I think it's safe to call this one fixed as for why the
problem started happening in the first place well power management has always
been and always will be a little bit of black magic a little tweak to how power
management works in a BIOS update silicon degradation or even just the
Silicon Lottery can affect how stable power management features will be for a
given system speaking of which get subscribed because we finally have our
last guide you'll ever need for how to build a PC coming up and if you liked
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except for the uog back to power management though it's
usually fine for laptops because of how tightly integrated the CPU and the logic
board are but not so much for desktops with modular components and longer
traces many power management features are in fact disabled by default on a
desktop particularly anything to do with PCI Express in my experience it's almost
never a good idea to enable these on a desktop unless you're doing it specifically to see if it does work for
your Hardware C states are usually okay
but there's a reason you'll see many threads about them on forums going back
many many years in this
case whatever it was it seems like it was just done luck but it's fixed now
and hopefully you'll come away from this video not only knowing that c States can
be flaky but also a little more about how to dig in and find out what a
problem might actually be and lonus will come back from vacation and I'll still
have a job and hey you'll also know a little bit more about our sponsor
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below thanks for watching guys this one's a bit different so why not check
out Linus's new rack it's also a bit different and a whole lot of fun