Hi all,
3 weeks ago I bought the NUC D54250WYK, with the following added HW:
- Kingston 8GB RAM (model KVR16LS11/8 DDR3L CL11 , apparently certified for the NUC)
- Intel mSATA SSD 530 series, 180 GB
- Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260 + Bluetooth
Installed Windows 7 x64 ultimate edition, and all the newest drivers available at the end of April (video driver 3496, GE driver 19.1, ME driver 1790, USB 3.0 driver 2.5.3.34, RST driver 1001, chipset device SW 1027, and latest BIOS 0025. I did not install Realtek ALC driver and latest video beta driver 3540 (but I don't see how that could affect the situation though).
I have Logitech K360 keyboard and T400 mouse connected to the Logitech unifying receiver. Monitor is connected over miniDP-to-DP cable. NUC is connected to the switch with gigabit ethernet.
The NUC randomly crashes (powers off immediately, same as if it had lost power) and then Windows restarts. There is no BSOD and no applicable information in Event viewer except a message that the system did not shutdown correctly: "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."
There are also messages like this in Event viewer: "The speed of processor 0 in group 0 is being limited by system firmware. The processor has been in this reduced performance state for 71 seconds since the last report."
This is reported for all four cores, but I guess this is not a big issue.
I haven't been able to reproduce the problem with the crash, but it happens with no apparent cause (sometimes only MS Word is open, sometimes a HD/SD movie in Media Player Classic - Home Cinema, sometimes only Firefox is open, sometimes a mix of apps, sometimes nothing; i.e. I could not find a sure-fire way to crash it). Once it also happened during Windows boot. It can happen once in a 1-2 hours, but it can also crash a few times in 10 minutes. There has never been a BSOD.
I tried uninstalling the latest Intel video drivers and left the Standard VGA driver, after which the system seems to be a bit more stable, but still crashes occasionally. When Intel video driver is installed, sometimes the monitor screen can get totally corrupted and Windows gets frozen. Tried also with 3412 version driver, same thing.
Temperatures do not spike, and are generally low (30-40 degrees). I tried increasing the fan duty cycle in BIOS to 50% to see if it will affect anything, but it didn't.
Prime95 has run normally for 20 minutes without a hitch, CPU temp went up to 67 degrees.
GPU test (Furmark) has also run for a couple of minutes with no issues. (But it also crashed - once Windows froze with screen corruption, once NUC crashed and rebooted).
Memtest95 reported no issues with the RAM (ran multiple passes for several hours).
I also tried booting Linux Mint 16 from live USB stick (nothing installed on SSD), and experienced the same crashes.
Today, after entering BIOS, NUC froze with screen corruption (happened today for the first time). It stayed like that for approx 10 seconds, then rebooted. Upon entering BIOS again, it was fine, but then froze again with screen corruption. I did not observe freezing and screen corruption on earlier BIOS version (0021), but Windows was crashing since I bought the NUC.
Tried removing the AC7260 card from the NUC to see if it will make any difference but it did not.
As this is happening in Windows, in Linux and in BIOS, it seems to me that the NUC is faulty. Having bought the certified RAM, and ran Memtest for a couple of hours without issues, I am inclined to think that RAM is fine.
EDIT: The same situation happens also in Windows safe mode. Sometimes the NUC crashes and sometimes the screen just corrupts and the NUC hangs and stays like that until force power off.
I would appreciate if anyone can give me any additional advice about what else to check or try as this is indeed getting quite frustrating (I could not see any errors in any logs).
Thanks in advance,
/HarveyV
Message was edited by: Mr Harvey