I’m wondering if I have a problem with my Rock 5c. Under high CPU load it always freezes and I have to pull the power. I’m currently using the Radxa release but Armbian does the same thing. It seems to be more stable using a POE hat rather than a 3a USB PSU but it still crashes in under 30s at full CPU load.
Using the official cooler, temperature about 45C maximum.
Any suggestions or is the board just toast?
I don’t have the 5C do have the rock5b. Only way we have been able to keep it running good is to bump the voltage upto 5.8v, heatsink on SoC and heatsink the NVMe to the aluminum cabinet. Mine is running about 52.7 degrees C / 127 F on all the cores, gpu and npu, with about 60% ram in use.
fred@rock5b:~$ cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone*/trip_point_*_temp
60000
85000
115000
115000
115000
115000
115000
115000
115000
Looks like mine is close to throttling at 60 C
Try some better power adapter, this may be issue
USB C Power supplies I’ve already tried about 6 and none of them seem to be stable even when idle. At least the board can stay up for more than a couple of hours using the POE hat I have (idle). Maybe I’ll try the official radxa POE hat and see if that is any better.
Check parameters on those, any supporting 5V 5A mode?
This also require right cable, if You are using cheap one rated for only 2A then it may be a problem.
Thanks, I’ll try a Raspberry Pi 5 5a PSU and see if that is any better, the two PD supplies didn’t make any difference but they are just cheap Chinese ones.
Pi5 PSU should be good 
Personally I never had any problems with radxa psu, also supporting 5A5V mode
Well the Raspberry Pi 5 PSU is the same as any other USB C PSU, sometimes I can get it to boot but its not stable, other times it wont even boot. Beginning to think there is a fault on the board to be honest. The official Radxa PSU is on the way from China but I don’t hold out much hope.
Can you try running memtester to check for memory errors?
No, it’s not,
It has 5A5V mode and thick cable for it.
This is totally different than many cheap chargers and power sources with unknown params, maybe ok for some phones, but problematic on SBSs.
Pi5 power source is fine, good quality and You won’t attach wrong cable to that one.
Most releases have their own problems. Make sure that You have safe release (i/e not some edge, dev kernels) and board is running with minimal and compatible components. I would get UART console to see what is going on, if it’s not booting probably there should be some error. Hangups often leaves some strack traces. Maybe something is wrong in memory chip or just easily replacable sd card.
If You tested with Pi5 27W power adapter then chances for anything better with Radxa one is minimal. Please note that it’s way different than any unknown usb adapter.
I mean its the same result
I’ve tried different sd-cards already and multiple releases, UART is the next thing because I do see it spewing a wall of text before it dies.
Currently running this release - https://github.com/radxa-build/rock-5c/releases/tag/rsdk-b1
Thanks, I just ran this and it comes back without any errors. Will leave it running a lot more loops and see if it throws any errors.
It may give some information what’s wrong. One of my boards had faulty wifi chip which was never used by me, I would never suspect that one!
If You are able to reproduce issue then maybe You can try to push some force on SoC and see if that helps, sometimes there is no connection on chip and this way You may find such issue.
Yep, this one is safe for sure.
I’m not sure but it starts with something related to rfcomm,
have You tried to disable bluetooth & wifi?
Spoke to support after getting crash reports / failures using memtester and they say the board is faulty, then spoke to customer service and they are shipping me a new board, just had to pay shipping. Good result in the end. Thanks for your help in this thread!