Did Catalina fry my 5700XT?

[sosurim]

Hi all,

I recently finished a build with the following parts:

* Asus Z390-I ROG Strix mobo
* Intel i7-8700K
* Air-cooled with Noctua NH-U14s
* G.skill Ripjaw 2x16GB sticks
* Gigabyte Gaming OC 5700XT
* Samsung 970 Evo Pro 512GB (on top of mobo)
* Sabrent Rocket 1TB (on bottom of mobo)
* all housed in Lian Li UT150 chassis

After struggling with Clover, I redid my system via Opencore, and this time installed Catalina w/o problems.

As I was enjoying the fruit of my success, however, I happened to reboot one time and just opened up a Netflix movie. After about two seconds, there was loud static noise coming from the system, as if there was some shorting in the circuits and few capacitors were blown, and at the same time the screen froze with a beachball. I panicked and immediately pressed the power button to shut it off.

I opened up the system, wondering if something got into any of the fans on the CPU, GPU and chassis, but nope. I checked if something burned somewhere, but nothing. So I powered it back on, and everything seemed to work okay. But I installed Win10 on the second drive, installed AMD's Adrenalin + Drivers and played with the fan profiling, and ended up turning of the Zero RPM feature, which made them spin at ~900RPM by default. I also spent days monitoring all the thermals using HWInfo64 and GPU-Z. It seemed everything was okay, at least on the Win side.

I spent another fully day reinstalling Catalina 10.15.6 after wiping the primary drive. And everything seemed okay on the macOS side as well.

Then yesterday, I booted into Catalina and on a whim, decided to run Cinebench. First run, in 2560x1440 resolution, ran fine, giving me a score of 3280. Disappointed with the score, I changed the res to 1080p and ran it again, but this time (after it was half done), it freaked out again, emitting the same loud, static/shorting noise as before, and froze with the beach ball. Again I panicked and powered off the machine.

During the launching of both Cinebench sessions, I could hear the GPU fans stepping up initially and get louder, but the fans were spinning smoothly, so no obstructions there. And because it crashed both times when taxing the GPU (albeit lightly with Netflix), I'm thinking it's the GPU that caused the popping static noise and the crash. So could it be that Catalina's 5700xt driver causing this? Because this doesn't seem to happen in Windows (but TBH I don't use Windows much to be 100% sure).

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Does it ever crash this hard? And if so, does it make sound as if it's frying inside? Also, does anyone have a suggestion as to a fix for this? I have my system as iMac19,1. Do you think changing to another system ID may prevent such crash?

Any suggestion or help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

S

 

[Leesureone]

Hi all,

I recently finished a build with the following parts:

* Asus Z390-I ROG Strix mobo
* Intel i7-8700K
* Air-cooled with Noctua NH-U14s
* G.skill Ripjaw 2x16GB sticks
* Gigabyte Gaming OC 5700XT
* Samsung 970 Evo Pro 512GB (on top of mobo)
* Sabrent Rocket 1TB (on bottom of mobo)
* all housed in Lian Li UT150 chassis

After struggling with Clover, I redid my system via Opencore, and this time installed Catalina w/o problems.

As I was enjoying the fruit of my success, however, I happened to reboot one time and just opened up a Netflix movie. After about two seconds, there was loud static noise coming from the system, as if there was some shorting in the circuits and few capacitors were blown, and at the same time the screen froze with a beachball. I panicked and immediately pressed the power button to shut it off.

I opened up the system, wondering if something got into any of the fans on the CPU, GPU and chassis, but nope. I checked if something burned somewhere, but nothing. So I powered it back on, and everything seemed to work okay. But I installed Win10 on the second drive, installed AMD's Adrenalin + Drivers and played with the fan profiling, and ended up turning of the Zero RPM feature, which made them spin at ~900RPM by default. I also spent days monitoring all the thermals using HWInfo64 and GPU-Z. It seemed everything was okay, at least on the Win side.

I spent another fully day reinstalling Catalina 10.15.6 after wiping the primary drive. And everything seemed okay on the macOS side as well.

Then yesterday, I booted into Catalina and on a whim, decided to run Cinebench. First run, in 2560x1440 resolution, ran fine, giving me a score of 3280. Disappointed with the score, I changed the res to 1080p and ran it again, but this time (after it was half done), it freaked out again, emitting the same loud, static/shorting noise as before, and froze with the beach ball. Again I panicked and powered off the machine.

During the launching of both Cinebench sessions, I could hear the GPU fans stepping up initially and get louder, but the fans were spinning smoothly, so no obstructions there. And because it crashed both times when taxing the GPU (albeit lightly with Netflix), I'm thinking it's the GPU that caused the popping static noise and the crash. So could it be that Catalina's 5700xt driver causing this? Because this doesn't seem to happen in Windows (but TBH I don't use Windows much to be 100% sure).

Has anyone else experienced this problem? Does it ever crash this hard? And if so, does it make sound as if it's frying inside? Also, does anyone have a suggestion as to a fix for this? I have my system as iMac19,1. Do you think changing to another system ID may prevent such crash?

Any suggestion or help will be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

S

What power supply are you using? Is it new and rated for the load the CPU and 5700XT need? Gigabyte recommends 600W minimum. Very unusual, you can always ask here being you have the same hardware.


https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/the-everything-works-asus-z390-i-gaming-i7-8700k-sapphire-nitro-radeon-rx-vega-64-build.272572/#Incompatible Components

 

[sosurim]

I have the minimum PSU, a Corsair SF600 Platinum 600W one. Because of my chassis required an SFF PSU, I had a tough time finding one anywhere. I'd have preferred higher wattage for some headroom, but the guy at a local computer shop said pickings slim due to covid. Maybe it's the PSU, dunno. But I thought this PSU would at least fire its fan if it reached max power output or something.

 

[Leesureone]

I have the minimum PSU, a Corsair SF600 Platinum 600W one. Because of my chassis required an SFF PSU, I had a tough time finding one anywhere. I'd have preferred higher wattage for some headroom, but the guy at a local computer shop said pickings slim due to covid. Maybe it's the PSU, dunno. But I thought this PSU would at least fire its fan if it reached max power output or something.

600 Watts meets the requirement. I wish I could tell you what’s happening besides that it’s super unusual. Typically when the OS or system gets overloaded you get a freeze or a kernel panic. This seems hardware related because of the popping noise (although I’ve never heard a GPU make anything but fan noise). I think you’d have to stress test it in another operating system to check.

 

[sosurim]

600 Watts meets the requirement. I wish I could tell you what’s happening besides that it’s super unusual. Typically when the OS or system gets overloaded you get a freeze or a kernel panic. This seems hardware related because of the popping noise (although I’ve never heard a GPU make anything but fan noise). I think you’d have to stress test it in another operating system to check.

I tried Cinebench r20 on Windows a few times, and it worked fine, albeit slower than I'd like. Which is why I'm thinking it's Catalina's fault, esp since reading the many others' posts about their 5700xt crashing under various versions of Catalina.

I wouldn't mind crashing if it didn't sound like my card is gonna blow. What is your SMBIOS set to, or at least one you think works best with 5700xt?

S

 

[sosurim]

Also, I just tried out your OC EFI. Works fine. I had tried ModMike's EFI's (both clover ones and OC ones), and they never worked for me for some reason. Same think when I tried one from pastrychef, iDrakus, et al.

I was able to create one of my own, after spending a whole day on it couple of weeks ago, and managed to install a clean install of Catalina. Finally, I thought I was done with this build and now this new problem with (I think) 5700xt comes up.

By the way, have you tried using a GUI boot picker with OC?

S

 

[Leesureone]

Also, I just tried out your OC EFI. Works fine. I had tried ModMike's EFI's (both clover ones and OC ones), and they never worked for me for some reason. Same think when I tried one from pastrychef, iDrakus, et al.

I was able to create one of my own, after spending a whole day on it couple of weeks ago, and managed to install a clean install of Catalina. Finally, I thought I was done with this build and now this new problem with (I think) 5700xt comes up.

By the way, have you tried using a GUI boot picker with OC?

S

Also, I just tried out your OC EFI. Works fine. I had tried ModMike's EFI's (both clover ones and OC ones), and they never worked for me for some reason. Same think when I tried one from pastrychef, iDrakus, et al.

I was able to create one of my own, after spending a whole day on it couple of weeks ago, and managed to install a clean install of Catalina. Finally, I thought I was done with this build and now this new problem with (I think) 5700xt comes up.

By the way, have you tried using a GUI boot picker with OC?

S

I've used iMac19,1 and iMacPro1,1 successfully and with my 5700XT never, ever had an issue (TG). Yes. I've used the GUI interface with OC but stopped with 5.9, just don't care for it all that much to add the extra step or two. If there were more options for icons or back ground I would.