I've been experiencing BSODs with the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL errors, particularly involving ntoskrnl.exe, for about a year now. I've been procrastinating fixing it, but the issues have been occurring more frequently lately, often in clusters where the crashes happen multiple times over a few days, followed by some periods without incidents.
Initially, I ran Memtest, which returned a failure. After removing two 16GB sticks, I'm now down to 32GB in dual channel configuration. However, the crashes persist. I even reinstalled Windows completely, but that didn't solve the issue either.
Right now, I'm using a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master motherboard with the F11 BIOS version—I'm wondering if this outdated BIOS could be at fault. I have a Ryzen 9 3900X CPU. I've attached minidumps for analysis, but I'm not quite sure how to interpret them with BlueScreenView. Any insight would be appreciated! Thanks!
2 Answers
First, it's essential to obtain the dump files from your minidump folder. Those files contain crash logs that help identify the BSOD issues. If you’re able to get back into Windows (you might need to boot into Safe Mode), navigate to C:WindowsMinidump, zip the files, and upload them to a file-sharing site like catbox.moe or mediafire.com. Multiple dump files can really help in diagnosing what's going on, and I recommend checking out this guide on creating a proper minidump if you haven’t already.
Your BIOS being outdated could definitely contribute to these issues. Frequent crashes related to memory corruption suggest a hardware problem is likely. If updating the BIOS doesn’t resolve the issue, consider testing your RAM as it could be faulty, or even the CPU itself.
When you say crashes happen all over the place, do you mean they show errors regarding different memory addresses? If I end up needing a new CPU, will I also need a new motherboard?