I’m hoping someone can help point me in a direction to diagnose a potential hardware problem.
Hardware setup:
- Ryzen 7 9700X
- MSI MAG B850 Tomahawk Max Wifi
- Corsair Vengance 32GB Ram
- Radeon RX9070XT
- Dell AW3423DWF Monitor connected with DisplayPort
Up until a week ago, I had an ASROCK B850 mobo installed. I was running Mint on this system for a while with no issues. Switched over to Fedora. Again, no hardware issues. Switched to CachyOS with no issues. Computer was snappy, responsive, and the monitor was able to run at full 3440x1440@165Hz with no issues.
Ran that way for about a week, then started to tinker with some things. In effort to potentially undervolt the GPU, I installed lact, ran the daemon, and enabled overclocking. I did not touch any other setting in the program, just enabled the overclock mode. Rebooted the computer, and the whole thing started locking up immediately upon logging in. I could sit on the login screen for as long as I wanted, but 10 seconds after logging in it completely freeze up to the point only a hard reset would do anything.
Tried loading up a prior snapshot, same thing….on all 10 prior snapshots.
Figuring I had screwed something up, I tried getting into the bios to enable USB boot to reboot. The bios was SLLLLLOOOOOWWW. All keyboard and mouse inputs took 10-15 seconds to register if they registered at all. This was my first indication that maybe I blew out some hardware. Managed to get thru that, reinstalled Cachy, was able to boot in, but the BIOS would take >2-3 minutes to get thru POST, with a VGA and a BOOT light both on the whole time. It would eventually do it, but it took a while.
After doing some research, I determined that this symptom was similar to what others had experienced when their ASROCK mobo had damaged the AMD CPU do to some bad voltage spikes on the ASROCK. Convinced I had found the culprit and not trusting the ASROCK anymore, I bought a new 9700X and an MSI mobo.
MSI mobo boots much faster, but still has a lag when actually in the bios. Not as bad as the ASROCK, but noticable and definitely not normal. maybe 4-5 seconds of input lag and not quite as many ignored keystrokes. Put a brand new CachyOS install on it so I know nothing on the old install is effecting it anymore. It was at this point I noticed the new install also dropped the option to run my monitor at 165Hz, and now only registers 99.98Hz at full resolution.
Now I’m wondering if my GPU may be in trouble, but I have no idea how to figure out what is wrong (if anything). When it’s all booted up, I can’t see any real performance hit, and it can still run most of my games at close to the old FPS numbers, and I haven’t seen any errors or faults in log files that would indicate a problem.
Sorry for the long text, but I’ve tried searching the internet for this and everything else I’ve found either points to an NVIDIA driver issue (no NVIDIA on my system) or an HDMI issue, but I’m not plugged in thru HDMI. If anyone can point me in a direction to continue troubleshooting, I would be grateful.
Well it seems like a lot has changed about your system recently.
This is purely speculation, but I would first look at your monitor OSD settings. Often they have to be put in a specific mode for the higher refresh rates to show. ( It can also be a cable limitation, depending on how you are plugged in, but if it worked before with the same GPU+Cable+Monitor, it’s probably not the cable. )
The GPU driver should be able to run the display at any rate it reports in its EDID.
If you are on KDE Plasma you can check it by going to kinfocenter (Info Center), and then going to EDID in the left sidebar under Graphics. It will list all the modes that the display shows it supports.
If the 165hz mode isn’t shown in the EDID, then it’s probably the monitor being in the wrong mode ( often you have to enable the higher refresh rates from the monitor OSD )
As for the slow UEFI/BIOS, I would say to try it with everything unplugged from the system. E.g. only a keyboard+mouse. Sometimes misbehaving devices can cause lag in the UEFI. Things like high polling rate mice/keyboards can also sometimes cause this, but it’s not as common with modern UEFI implementations.
Thanks for responding. I managed to get the refresh rate sorted out…..but I have no idea what the problem was:
I tried checking the monitor settings again, but there is no OSD setting for the refresh rate.
For giggles, I swapped the DisplayPort cable with an HDMI cable, and it was still reading the same 99.98hz maximum. However, when I unplugged the HDMI cable, and plugged the DisplayPort cable back in, the 165hz option came back and it’s able to run there. I have no idea what the problem was, but I have to assume it was something stuck in the Monitor firmware side of things?
As for the InfoCenter, the EDID section was showing the 99.98hz previously and now it’s back to the 164.9hz maximum. The only issue I can see in that section is that I’m getting failure on the Colorimetry Data Block MD0-MD3 which according to a cursory search shouldn’t(?) have anything to do with a refresh rate issue.
Block 2, DisplayID Extension Block:
Version: 1.2
Display Product Type: Standalone display device
Video Timing Modes Type 1 - Detailed Timings Data Block:
DTD: 1920x1080 143.847177 Hz 16:9 162.260 kHz 337.500000 MHz (aspect 16:9, no 3D stereo)
Hfront 48 Hsync 32 Hback 80 Hpol P
Vfront 3 Vsync 5 Vback 40 Vpol N
DTD: 2560x1440 59.950550 Hz 16:9 88.787 kHz 241.500000 MHz (aspect 16:9, no 3D stereo)
Hfront 48 Hsync 32 Hback 80 Hpol P
Vfront 3 Vsync 5 Vback 33 Vpol N
DTD: 3440x1440 164.900019 Hz 16:9 283.133 kHz 1019.280000 MHz (aspect 16:9, no 3D stereo)
Hfront 48 Hsync 32 Hback 80 Hpol P
Vfront 3 Vsync 10 Vback 264 Vpol N
Checksum: 0x90
----------------
Failures:
Block 1, CTA-861 Extension Block:
Colorimetry Data Block: Reserved bits MD0-MD3 must be 0.
EDID conformity: FAIL
Still have the UEFI lag, but I haven’t gotten to do the “unplug everything” yet. I’ll have to give it a try later.