- There it is.
I have a problem.
I just updated the bios on my work station
and ever since I did it's been
(fingers snaps) 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 three minutes
my wife is going to absolutely murder me.
So, we're gonna call in the cavalry here.
Dialing A for Anthony.
Hey, Anthony.
- Uh, hello?
- (laughs) Can you fix something for me?
- Maybe.
- Okay, cool. My computer is turning off and I gotta go.
(fingers snap)
- (sighs) 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 from a sponsor.
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(soft music)
(upbeat music)
- Linus tells me that he updated the bios
in order to upgrade to Windows 11
and the computer has 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 mm-hmm, 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 gonna have a hard time
getting in under there.
And you're not gonna be able to see that either
because not only is it kinda dark,
but the TV is also covering it all up,
but it looks like the 810, 12 volt 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 torquing,
the retention mechanism can flatten out the sockets pins
so 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 that, 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 hit lucky.
First, we'll open up a system monitoring tool
like HWiNFO 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 start-up items.
CPU usage looks okay to me right now.
We're at 3% with only a few things
actually, being used right now, you've got a LVS running
and I guess Linux 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.
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 around 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, that seems perfectly fine to me.
Yeah. That's not even all that hot.
The hotspot temperature is in the 60s.
So, this cooling set up 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 kinda be tipped off about it
before it inevitably shuts down.
Before we move on, we should look at the voltages.
Now, something to bear in mind
about software reported CPU voltages
is that they're not always correct.
They can change more quickly than the 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-Line 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 gonna get that voltage
under any circumstances.
Now this is an Overclock 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 offs.
So it's worth keeping an eye on.
Next, 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 start 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 how you Event Viewer
has been around since Windows 2000.
It is basically unchanged, even in Windows 11.
We'll head over to Windows logs and then system.
Now, Buddy fault, this is sorted by date and time.
So we'll scroll down to the last time we know it happened
and see what Window sees.
Now, I actually already see some things here.
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 it 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 of these distributed calm 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 weird is 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.
No, it doesn't look
like there's any patterns showing up 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.
Set up on the other hand are related to Windows updates
and a failed or broken Windows update
can sometimes do what we're seeing all the...
Usually with a reboot instead of a shutdown as expected.
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.
Buddy fault, modern CPU's will enter a low power state
when they're not in use called C states.
Not to be confused with S states like sleeper
or 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 ramp up its performance
in response to load.
C states are just in the opposite direction.
Then depending on the state,
the system might turn off some parts of the CPU
or pack inactive cores
to significantly reduce power consumption
and the voltage supply 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 and turning off, C states.
To do that we will 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 Linux was still like doing stuff,
but oh, well (keyboard key clicking)
this is how you get into the bios usually.
(keyboard keys clicking)
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 function
to select UEFI firmware settings,
but we didn't do that.
And so I have to match delete.
(keyboard keys clicking)
From here we're gonna look for C states.
Now some bioses like ACEs, lets you use the search function,
which we will use.
But sometimes you'll find it in like CPU configuration
under advanced or sometimes you'll find it in
like a power management configuration.
For now we'll just hit F9 to do search and do C state.
(keyboard keys clicking)
And this is enabled, sometimes you'll see two of them,
one for global C state control and one for C1E
or Enhanced Halt.
If we had that here, we would disable it as well.
For now, let's go ahead and disable C states.
It's a... 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 exit screen
and it'll ask you if you wanna 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, (air swooshing)
I've got my water bottle from lttstore.com
to keep my drink cold until 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 wanna 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 this video, you'll love that one.
It's the longest video we've ever done,
except for the, Yule Log. (fire rattling)
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 dumb 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 Linus will come back from vacation
and I'll still have a job.
And hey, you'll also know a little bit more
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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.