VR Computer woes and going Pixel-XL to replace the Note 7

Final phone swap…

I’ve successfully ordered a 128 GB Pixel XL to replace my replacement Note 7. I’ll be sticking with the Note 7 until the new phone arrives and just treating it carefully in the interim. Looks like the Pixel will likely meet most of my needs. I’ll miss the stylus and external SD card but I can work with 128 GB of storage.

VR Computer

The new computer I’ve been building to support writing VR code and testing it is not behaving well. I’ve had the machine loaded with software twice now and it is proving flaky. It runs for hours to tens of hours but sporadically hangs, often in nasty seeming ways. I have not changed any of the BIOS settings since I received the hardware and have done no overclocking.

The system initially started up and ran without issues. I loaded Windows and began adding tools and VR software. I started seeing the system do ugly things sporadically…

  • It would startup and spend a long time at 19 on the diagnostic LEDs (some sort of south-bridge initialization I believe) ending up at 51 which appears to indicate a memory error.
  • It would hang with dark diagnostic LEDs and the front power and reset buttons would be ineffective. Powering it off and then back on again at this point would sometimes give the 51 error.
  • If the system was running and active then it would sometimes go to sleep and refuse to wake. This was often a ‘hard’ failure with mouse, keyboard, ctl/alt/del, front power button and reset button all being ineffective.

The system build consists of:

The two sets of DDR4 memory were an attempt to diagnose the problems I’ve been seeing. Swapping the new memory in didn’t make a difference. The system ran overnight, reinstalling software but this morning, just before I left for work it refused to wake (at least the monitor, it is currently set not to sleep as I’m running installs that take some time). This was one of its ‘hard fail’ conditions. Neither the power button nor the hard reset button made any difference. When I powered off the power supply for a span, it came up with a long pause and reported a memory error (hence the second set of memory sticks).  I’ve installed a CPU temperature monitor program and the CPU temperature has been very low with no noticeable spikes so the cooler appears to be doing its job.

I’ll be trying further fault isolation over the weekend, but I’m beginning to think the motherboard is the problem.

I expect that I’ll pull the extra USB card and the front panel USB hub, remove the GTX1080 temporarily and fall back to the integrated graphics and see what happens. If this system remains unstable at that point I’ll probably borrow the power supply from my Ubuntu system (which I’m not actively using at the moment) and leave things with only the CPU and motherboard as possible suspects. If this fails then I’ll start talks with Gigabyte about a warranty replacement. Not looking forward to another long wait to get this system on its feet though.

 

2 thoughts on “VR Computer woes and going Pixel-XL to replace the Note 7”

  1. Looks like mdsched.exe may help with the memory diagnostics.
    winsat formal might not be available in win10 but is worth a look to update the system manifest.

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