Z690 Gaming X DDR4 random freezes

[nzmike]

Hi all, built a new rig a few months ago using the following:

Z690 Gaming X DDR4
Intel i5 12600k (with Noctua NH-U12S)
16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR400-3200 2x8GB (since upgraded to 32GB with two more sticks)
Colorful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB (GA106-32)
Cooler Master V750 Gold V2 (Fully modular)
1 x WD Black SN750 500GB NVMe (boot drive)
1 x WD Black SN850 1TB NVMe (games, docs, media etc)
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD

BIOS: F8b (upgraded early June '22)
OS: Windows 10 x64 (with all latest patches/upgrades)

XMP is on but apart from that I've not modified the BIOS except to make the first NVMe drive to be the boot drive.

The issue I'm having is totally random freezes - I can be doing literally anything (web browsing, gaming, dev work/coding, Office, etc) and it just freezes.  I then have to do a hard restart because even a soft reset will often not get past one of  the four BIOS booting stages.  Sometimes these issues happen at boot up where one of the red lights shows on the motherboard but again, it's totally random so I'm not able to reproduce the error.

I have checked the system using the usual tools like DISM, SFC, MemTest etc and nothing shows any issues at all. 
I've run the system through MSI Kombustor 4 (x64) to stress it and had no issues and it did not freeze in those tests.
And there is nothing in the event viewer that gives me any clue as to what is happening. 

So obviously my question is what to do next?  I can't reproduce the freezes, they are just totally random.
I'm very tech savvy so am happy to look into anything else and run any diagnostic tools if anyone can offer any help.
If it's any use I can run MiniTool or CPU-z to generate reports etc and upload to DropBox.

To me it would appear to be a MB issue given how flaky these early Gigabyte Z690's have been but of course I have no way of proving this. I rely on this PC for my day to day dev work and I need it to be stable but I just don't know how to troubleshoot this so if anyone can help I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks,
Mike

[shadowsports]

Greetings Mike,
Obvious questions.

What was the shipping BIOS?
Was the system randomly freezing prior to upgrading to F8b?

Where did you get that BIOS...  the support portal only offers F7b  Is that a typo or did you find it on tweaktown, etc?

Latest isn't always greatest. 

[dmdilks]

You might have to upgrade to windows 11. Sorry but windows 11 works better with the 2 CPU's. Here is a example I play a game called Anno 1800. I was running it on my i5-12600K and not having problems. Other people were running it on windows 10 and couldn't get the game to run. Windows 11 turns off the 2nd CPU when playing games.

[nzmike]

What was the shipping BIOS?
Was the system randomly freezing prior to upgrading to F8b?

Where did you get that BIOS...  the support portal only offers F7b  Is that a typo or did you find it on tweaktown, etc?

Hi there - thanks for your reply and sorry I've not replied since, I was away on holiday and then buried in work since my return.

Yes, the freezes have been happening since day one and still happening since F8B (I had another just last night).

I'm not sure I can remember the shipping BIOS TBH as I built a couple of months ago but I've upgraded the BIOs maybe 2 or 3 times so we're probably talking F6 or F7.

The F8b BIOS is from this page which I believe is the right one for my motherboard:
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z690-GAMING-X-DDR4-rev-10/support#support-dl-bios

At the same time I did my build a friend did an almost identical build to mine but used an Asus Z690 board and has no issues whatsoever. I'm now at the point where unless I can resolve this soon I may buy the same board, rebuild from scratch and see if I'm still having issues - then I'll know if it'sone of my componenents or is in fact the Gigabyte M/B.  Obviously I don't want to as that's an expensive and time consuming way of testing but I just can't have a flaky machine, I rely on it for mu job and income and freezes while I'm coding or working can be costly.

Anyway, before I go down that route, what else would you suggest in order to try and isolate the issue?

[dmdilks]

All the stuff I'm reading says that i5-12600K will run better on windows 11. Even Intel says to run windows 11 on the new CPU's. The 2 boards that I have had run windows 11 with no problems. On my first board I had to update the bios. The reason why it wasn't seeing the NVMe drive. The 2nd board no bios update.