Coffelake modded Z270 Board: Endless spinning wheel at Windows logon

[davidm71]

Hi,

Lately I have been experiencing an endless spinning wheel when I start Windows before I can see the desktop. For almost a year everything had been working pretty good considering I was able to coffee lake mod my Z270 Apex IX board to work with a 9700K cpu. Was able to play games and work with the machine without issues but one day a few months ago Windows failed to boot up. The wheel would spin endlessly after bios passed control to the boot loader. I might have experimented with memory overclocking at best but left the cpu running at stock voltages set at 1.30 volts. The actual bios I used was made by a modder known as Dsanke.

Anyhow so after the first time this happened I reinstalled Windows and was ok for a month. This time setting ram to XMP stock settings. Then it happened again. Even automatic repair failed to fix the problem but was able to recover by using the Windows install stick to 'Repair my computer'. After it did its thing I saw that it said something like 'Failed Windows update removed' and was able to boot back into windows again. So I tried to turn off Windows update and did a 7 day pause after a couple updates sneaked by me. Thats the best Windows settings offers and was good for another week and it happened again the other day. This time the Windows install stick repair computer routine could not repair or even uninstall updates. Not even sure if updates were at fault but had to restore a backup to get it going again. Have a dual boot Macrium partition I installed the last time this happened just in case. Restoring a backup takes like two minutes.

Only thing is now my motherboard audio is making popping and crackling sounds randomly. Not sure if its related. Not sure what to do next. Ready to chalk it up to experience and fun while it lasted and get a real Z390 board maybe. The CPU is under extended two year warranty at Microcenter. Was an open box item. Thinking of maybe just going Z490 but would have to sell the 9700K. Luckily the Apex board was like $60 investment at the time.

Next thinking of Stress testing it. Got to get a better virus scanner maybe but not sure if its a virus or something else. Could be a bad Windows update or just data corruption occuring.

How can I tell?

Thanks

Specs:

Asus Z270 Apex IX Dsanke Mod
9700K CPU w/ 32 gb Gskill Ram
WD SN750 NVME 512 gb drive
WD 750 NVME U.2/ WD 750 PCI.E Soft Raided.
Two Intel SATA drives Intel Raid 0
one SATA mechanical data drive.
MSI 2080 Trio GPU Graphic card
Killer Networking AX1650 wifi card.
Windows 10 1909.

 

[Maxson]

Have you run a memory test to see if it's your RAM causing the issue? If it is then maybe you need to look at your BIOS settings. If not it could be a motherboard fault or a driver issue.

It also sounds like you OS install is corrupted and will never be right again. At this point I would back up your files and doing a fresh install of windows. Do you have a hard drive image of a clean OS drive? Either that or wipe the drive and re-install from a newly downloaded windows 10. Definitely back up your precious files to an external drive or another location anyway as the most upsetting part of a corrupt windows is the loss of those files.

 

[davidm71]

I ran HCL Memtest for an hour. Guess I should do more testing. Anyhow yes I did restore a clean Macrium image of a fresh install I did the last time this happened. Think maybe the 9700K's memory controller can't handle 3200 mhz stock setting. Forgot that 3200mhz is technically an overclock. Despite how much I abused the processor by making the mod work it was an open box item at microcenter. Have a feeling someone must have returned after realizing the chip failed the silicon lottery. Luckily for me I have extended warranty and will probably bring it back before the warranty is up.

Thanks

 

[Fangio1951]

I ran HCL Memtest for an hour. Guess I should do more testing. Anyhow yes I did restore a clean Macrium image of a fresh install I did the last time this happened. Think maybe the 9700K's memory controller can't handle 3200 mhz stock setting. Forgot that 3200mhz is technically an overclock. Despite how much I abused the processor by making the mod work it was an open box item at microcenter. Have a feeling someone must have returned after realizing the chip failed the silicon lottery. Luckily for me I have extended warranty and will probably bring it back before the warranty is up.

Thanks

hi davidm71,

I have a Gigabyte Auros Z2770 Gaming 9 Extreme mobo running Gskill 3866 memory.

I've tried numerous times to run intel XMP, but it refused to work no matter what I did.

I've seen a LOT of post here regarding the same XMP issues and the best solution was to set the ram settings manually in the bios.

I manually set my ram settings in the bios which worked - at one stage I was able to get my ram running @ 4100Mhz, but wasn't very stable, so wound it back for stability sake

regards

 

[davidm71]

Thanks for the tip. Will try manually setting the ram speed. Will also turn off Speedstep and just fix the frequency at 4600 ghz or something. The thing about this mod is that voltage regulation is like bare metal and needs more refining than an actual Coffelake motherboard. Though still I'm not sure what the issue was because like I said it worked great for like 6 months. Well at least until I started experimenting with memory overclocking. Note that I didn't over volt my ram more than .05 - .10 volts to turn 1.35 v into 1.40 or 1.42 at the highest. Back to square one..

Thanks