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i7-4770K and z87x-u5dh build freezing

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Sep 30, 2013
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Motherboard
Asus Z97-Deluxe, 32GB GSkill RipjawsX, Corsair H60 water cooler, Corsair RM750 PS
CPU
i7-4770K
Graphics
Radeon HD 7950 3072 MB
Mac
  1. MacBook Pro
Classic Mac
  1. 0
Mobile Phone
  1. iOS
Hi everyone. I just finished building and installing my first Hackintosh and have one tiny problem. Well, kind of a huge one. Everything is working perfectly except for the fact that the computer freezes every 20-30 minutes. No error message or crash or anything- the computer totally freezes in time. Screens and everything stay on, but the clock stops at the time it froze. It's unresponsive and must be shut down the hard way by holding the power button.

The only odd thing I've noticed one time is that the USB seemed to shut down. I only noticed this because the LED light on my Wacom tablet was off. The other times it has frozen the USB stuff stayed powered up.

From what I can tell, there isn't anything triggering it. It does it whether the computer is sitting idle or working.

In terms of hard drives, I'm booting off of a 500GB Samsung 840 Evo. I have a 128GB 840 Evo for a swap drive, and three more SATA drives for storage and Time Capsule. All drives are running off the "regular" controller and not connected to the Marvell one.

Just to double check, here are the settings I applied with Multibeast after the installation:

-User DSDT or DSDT-Free Installation
-ALC898 (without DSDT)
-Intel hnak's Apple Intel E1000 ethernet
-Chimera 2.2.1
-Graphics Enabler=No
-System Definition: iMac 13.2

Did I miss anything? The motherboard is still on Optimized Defaults and the only thing I changed in there was to disable the onboard graphics because that was causing issues loading OSX initially.


I could really use some help because I've searched and searched for anything resembling the problem I'm having but haven't run across anything that's been effective. It's so annoying because other than the computer being essentially unusable and (until it's fixed...) a gigantic waste of money it's really nice. Haha.
 
Oh shoot. I'm on my own here, aren't I?
 
I'm having the same exact problem. It all works perfectly but every couple hours, everything freezes, mouse doesn't work and the clock stops running. Even when booting -v, no text comes on the screen. I've checked the console to see what was happening right before the freeze, and nothing significant shows up.

Things that I though could have cause my freezes:
-Fermi Freeze: I have a gtx570, and thought this might be the cause. But since you don't have a Fermi card, so I'm ruling that out. Besides, this card worked perfectly on my old i7-950 build before I went haswell.

-RAM: For some reason, initially my ram was set to 1.5v, when it's actually rated to 1.65v. Setting it manually to it's clock, voltage and timings did improve things a little. I have 32Gb of tridentx at 2400Mhz 1.6v. In no way this appeared to be a power or temperature issue. Right now my hottest core is at 34ºC, and I have an 860w PSU.

-Less ram: I noticed that when only using one of the four 8Gb sticks, I'd have no freezes. So I thought I had a defective stick. I almost even RMAd my memory. But then I did 2 overnight Memtest86 runs, and all sticks passed with flying colors.

-For a reason different than the freezes, I had to reinstall the whole system and I'm not on a clean 10.8.5 install. I have to say that It has only frozen once in 2 days, and coincidentally, my RAM was back to the wrong 1.5v (optimized defaults). I set it back to 1.65v and well, everything seems to be ok for now. Let's see what happens.


...thankfully this build boots up in about 15 seconds.
 
Thanks for pointing out the 1.65 volts thing. I'll definitely check out the specs for my ram and change that if it's supposed to be higher. Like you, my ram is currently at the 1.5v default.

So just in case anyone has this problem later on and checks this thread, here's where I'm at. Last night I focused my attention on the motherboard and ram with varying successes. Despite this not being my board, I decided to change the settings according to this guide as well:

http://www.tonymacx86.com/99-quick-guide-configuring-uefi-gigabyte-s-7-series-lga-1155-boards.html

I also noticed that my RAM was running at 1333Mhz instead of 1600, so I changed that as well. It led to some odd results. Next time I booted into OSX, my processor was showing up as 1.5 Ghz. I figured it was just a glitch because it had previously reported as 3.6, which is close to what it is. However, when I ran Geekbench, it scored a LOT lower. I went back into the BIOS and double checked the CPU settings and everything was set properly, but it would not run at full speed. Another odd thing was that now my CPU cooler was running at 100% all the time instead of ramping up when the CPU was being used harder. Yet another headscratcher.

Despite all of this, the system was stable, which was a good sign. So I let the computer to run at 1.5Ghz and ran memtestOSX overnight. No freeze, which is excellent.

This morning I was in and out of the BIOS trying to reset to optimized defaults but it still wasn't running the CPU at the proper speed. At one point, I rebooted and instead of going straight into the BIOS after pressing delete like it usually does, I got prompted with something about the BIOS being set improperly. Unfortunately, I don't remember what it specifically said. So from that screen, I reset it to defaults, went into the BIOS and changed all of the important settings (XMP to on, internal graphics off and all of the stuff from the guide posted above...). I even decided to put the Medium performance profile on because I figured if it's gonna lock, it's gonna lock so it's worth the try. OSX started fine, the CPU reported perfectly and the CPU fan was finally ramping up and down according to workload.

Currently the computer is running at 4.2-4.3Ghz.

I ran MemtestOSX for six hours this afternoon and things seems stable for now. Hopefully they stay that way! If I run into any more problems, I'll be sure to post an update.

I'd still love to hear from anyone that may know why my BIOS didn't truly reset to defaults when I was telling it to. Clearly, it was holding on to some odd settings. Who knows. Here's a Geekbench screen shot:

Overclocked Screen Shot 2013-10-05 at 9.56.35 AM.png

Weird how the CPU shows up as 5 Mhz, huh? In About This Mac it is a 4.3 GHz Intel Core i7.
 
Just checked my RAM and it's spec'd to run at 1.5.
 
And it just locked up again. My Wacom tablet has no power, but other ports do.

And again for some reason, the CPU fan is running at full speed, which seems to happen. I don't understand how that's related, but it is. I assume I'm in for a bunch of freezing again. Darnit.

Right now I'm starting to wonder if this is somehow USB related. Just grabbing at straws though.
 
That CPU fan running at full clip got me thinking. I have a Corsair H60 water cooler and it turns out I had the pump and fan connections on the wrong headers. They were reversed. The pump was running super slowly and the chip was overheating.

In my defense, the fancy BIOS (windows mode) on this motherboard didn't help at all. In the system status it was only showing System Temperature and PCH temperature. I knew that System was the case temp and assumed (oh, isn't assuming the root problem of everything?) that PCH was the chip temp. No, that's the motherboard chipset temperature. Turns out that the CPU temperature isn't displayed in Windows Mode. Why not? Who the MF knows?

Anyway, I went into Classic Mode to check it out and instantly saw that the CPU temp was 88 degrees Celsius. I immediately shut the system off and looked up the best headers to connect the water cooler to. In the end, the water cooler pump was running at 400 or so RPM and should've been doing about 2200.

Yeah, so I'm guessing this is problem solved. I'd be surprised if this isn't it, really. (Dear lord, I hope I don't eat those words. *knocking on wood*)

Hopefully this helps out the one other person who has the same setup and manages to make the same stupid mistake. Haha.
 
So there you go. This thread is a nice example of how to troubleshoot on your own. Yay me. :oops::thumbup:
 
As feared- I had spoken too soon. Freezing is still occurring.

I just don't understand how the computer can stay on sometimes for a whole night and other times freeze up after 10 minutes. As of right now, this computer is completely useless to me.

If anyone has anything they can offer I'm all ears because after four days of trying to fix this, I'm out of ideas as well as patience.
 
Yeah. I guess I'll be going process of elimination style for the next bit. What a pain.

And I'll definitely do up a build wrap-up post when I get things working. Right now I just want to get this thing working! :evil:
 
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