I was getting random hard crashes in the Vision D using a Radeon VII. Every now and then I’d get random graphical glitches that necessitated a reboot. Sometimes, the computer would boot with a black screen. Ever since Big Sur 11.1 beta1, things became bad. Hard crashes. I clocked down the 10700K to stock and nothing helped. It was crashing even in Windows. Hard crashes. I upgraded to the F7 beta BIOS. Hard crashes. A couple of times, the system didn’t post. I even got a random message trying to post one time: the Vision D said I had a hardware error. I removed the RAM, etc. Nothing was working. I couldn’t use webcams in webex... hard crashes. I couldn’t use Serato... hard crash. Sometimes when I’d resume from sleep, soon after I’d have a hard crash. I thought it was a USB or Thunderbolt problem. But it wasn’t.
I was about to abandon Z490. But, before I did, I noticed I was using just one PCIe power cord with the Radeon VII (my PSU’s PCIe power cords have two plugs). I then plugged a separate PCIe power cord into my modular PSU, such that each 8-pin power port on the Radeon VII has its own PCIe power cord directly connected to the PSU. (I’m using white AsiaHorse cabling inside the white Lian li o11 dynamic xl case.. looks quite nice).
The system has been stable ever since I made this move. Rock solid. Has been up for two weeks. Sleeps just fine, like a baby. I’m getting similar stability to my old MSI Z170.
For those having graphics card problems, maybe if you haven’t already done so, try using two separate PCIe power cords for each power port on your GPU, and see if that helps.
