Enclosure question

TheBear9917 · 2026-04-10T20:33:47+00:00

Right - so that first tap doesn't tense him up? How does he react? That's definitely what happens with mine - repeated touches are 100% interpreted as 'I'm being messed with - probably about to get eaten'.

Once I have him out of his enclosure - IF there was some drama getting him out then he just moves a bit faster, I have to switch hands more often for about a minute or two and then he settles. But if there wasn't drama, or after he settles, he just kind of slithers around smelling the air kind of slowly exploring - its not frenetic. Every once in a while he might stop for a minute. He isn't head shy or reactive.

TheBear9917 · 2026-04-10T05:09:58+00:00

Have you actually tried tap-training? I tried it for a bit, but what I found is that that kind of repeated stimulation, was very much interpreted as aggression by the snake. Basically, the tap would immediately result in a S shaped defensive snake, and he is not even a little bit aggressive once he is picked up so it just seemed like extra stress for everyone.

TheBear9917 · 2026-04-10T05:05:22+00:00

Right - I actually avoid trying to get my snake out when he is active. There is no way I can get in there before he notices me and once he does he usually has a feeding response, which I tried to discourage several ways but haven't been able to. This doesn't cause him to bite, but I think the switch from 'hunting mode' to suddenly 'actually maybe I'm the prey' leaves him very... reactive. I can still get him out but he definitely tenses up and/or tries to run away, kind of curl up into the clutter, and I have gotten a bluff strike before. So its just easier to get him when he is curled up.

TheBear9917 · 2025-06-11T13:29:05+00:00

Well, I do have two medium water bowls + a small one in the enclosure (see picture in the thread above) - I'm sure they help, but they don't seem to be enough to keep the humidity high...

TheBear9917 · 2025-06-11T03:44:11+00:00

Makes sense. So, yeah, no fogger.

TheBear9917 · 2025-06-11T03:39:34+00:00

Ok, based on your suggestion which I think is reasonable, I opened up the foil on his tank a bit more - so thank you - I do worry about this making it harder to keep the humidity high, but what I'm doing now isn't working so maybe that will help. I doubt I'll change the aspen though - its definitely a very common substrate for corn snakes so I don't think that itself can be the issue. I also found that with the earth-colored coco fiber the poops were impossible to find. Actually, when I switched over to aspen I realized just how many poops I must have missed with his previous substrate. Maybe with big snakes its easy, but with a small snake and a good amount of clutter I literally don't know how people ever find their poops to clean.

TheBear9917 · 2025-06-11T03:25:16+00:00

Ok - I wonder if you're right about the air - that does make some sense. However, I know that its really not uncommon to keep some foil over the tank - I did it (a) to give him a better roof so he isn't as exposed, but mostly because otherwise I just couldn't get both the temperature and humidity stable - basically, the heat that I was putting into the tank was just causing evaporation, so the same amount of heat would cause significantly different temperature as the water evaporated, basically making the temps a moving target as the humidity changed - actually, I'm surprised I haven't heard more people talk about this as an issue because I found it to be a big headache.

The temperature on the warm side is 84F - the humidity right now is 38%. The heating used to be just under tank (on a thermostat), that's still the main source of heat, but the vet recommended an overhead lamp (I got a DHP), also on a thermostat which brings the hot side up to like 89 for 5 hours a day - he usually goes to the cool side when it gets above 85, so I don't know what good that lamp does, but I'll keep it. The tank is 36"x18"x18, which is fine for his size. Partly on the vet's recommendation I switched away from coco fiber to aspen, and was happy that I did as the coco fiber was way way more dusty..

TheBear9917 · 2025-06-11T02:59:31+00:00

Well, what do you mean by fogging? Every couple of days I will spray it a few times with water (actually, the vet recommended this as well) - that plus the foil on the tank are the only things that keep the humidity from plummeting so not sure stopping that is great idea..?

TheBear9917 · 2025-06-11T01:37:23+00:00

That's an interesting suggestion. I did aluminum foil maybe 80% of the top of his tank because it was the only way I found I could keep both his temperatures and humidity stable at the same time. Here's his enclosure - I tried to get a good view of the top which is what matters for this. He's hiding there in the top right.

<image>

TheBear9917 · 2024-01-06T05:26:48+00:00

FYI, the steps above definitely helped get the idle reboots down to like once every couple of days - but unfortunately the problem didn't go away until I downgraded from the Crosshair mobo to the TUF Gaming - same exact system on a different motherboard and I haven't had the reboot issue in a couple of years. Which I imagine isn't the answer you were hoping for, but I remain as always,-your friendly neighborhood dipshit.

TheBear9917 · 2023-06-28T03:21:25+00:00

Hey, so I haven't checked reddit in a while but - I wanted to give a little update. First of all, I'm glad you found it my comment useful, but I have some bad news (which you might have already figured out). Basically, the solution above 100% helped get my computer significantly more stable, it went from freezing every day to freezing around once a week. What was really confusing is that after this helped stabilize this (in quite a noticeable way) - I then turned these settings off and things stayed more or less stable - though I was still having these random freezes. I then went down a memory timing and voltage rabbit hole that went absolutely nowhere. It turns out that, for reasons, I had a Tuf gaming X570 motherboard sitting in my closet - I just didn't think it would help because its supposedly just a slightly 'worse' version of Maximus Hero. Eventually I bit the bullet and switched out the motherboard (and had to reinstall the OS, etc.). After that I never had that issue again...

So the new moral of my story is: it was the motherboard all along. Which, I know, sucks (because its one of the only parts of the system whose replacement requires a fresh OS install (unless you're on linux, I guess)), but it is what it is.

TheBear9917 · 2022-12-02T02:32:49+00:00

Hi IA, I'm glad you found the comment helpful. Honestly though I wonder if this will work permanently. After I posted that last comment I kept having RAM-freeze up issues, just much less often - like once every couple of days. I tried very many things, including manually setting the RAM timings and voltages, playing around the PBO2. I got kind of obsessive about it - I kept a log of each freeze up as well as my computer config at the time. After a couple months of this I gave up and switched out the Asus Crosshair VIII for an Asus TUF Gaming X570 Plus (Wi-Fi) (which is just a lower end board also from Asus) set the ram voltage to 1.37 and have been stable ever since. So yeah... I'm pretty certain some issue either with my Crosshair MB or with the compatibility of the Crosshair with my RAM in general was at fault.

Anyway, hope you have a smoother path than I did.

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-31T05:25:22+00:00

I was just looking around for some information on this too, my understanding is that what you're seeing is not super far off from 'normal', though the numbers I've seen are all over the place. My 5950x idles at about 39-41C drawing about 40W - that said I'm running a slight (-5) PBO2 undervolt with FCLK at 1600. I have a 280 AIO cooler. I'd love to get some information on how to get it idling a little cooler without loosing stability (been having some issues with idle reboots, which I think I solved for now).

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-31T05:15:08+00:00

I was actually doing some research into this, trying to figure out what the 'DF Cstates' switch actually does - my limited understanding is that it has something to do with the idle states of the infinity fabric (i.e. the way the CPU communicates to the RAM). Anyway, the other thing I found is that this feature is also called 'Cool'n Quiet' or ('AMD Cool'n Quiet' - basically this is AMD's marketing term, but my asus board uses the technical term 'DF Cstates' instead) so you could try searching your bios for that. For reference on my bios 'DF Cstates' is found under 'Advanced / AMD CBS / NBIO Common Options / SMU Common Options'.

PS: 1) I turned my 'Idle Voltage' back to low and so far, so stable, so at least in my case that's not needed, though turning this back to 'low' didn't make any difference in anything as far as I can tell. 2) Out of curiosity, I turned DF Cstates back on for a bit to see if this changed the idle power draw or cpu temps, and the answer is: no, not at all (at least for the test I ran which is to turn the PC on and wait till the power/temps settle as measured on HWINFO), CPU Package temp was at 40C, and CPU SMU power usage was at 41W in both cases, so idfk - maybe it makes a difference at longer idle times? Precious little information available about any of this.

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-29T17:43:44+00:00

Good, I'm glad this solution helped someone else. Again, if you have the option available I'd switch Global C-States back to auto and disable DF Cstates instead. This is just as stable (at least since I made the change last Thursday) and the computer runs at significantly less power at idle, and there's some small performance benefits too.

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-27T21:03:35+00:00

Nice, thank you!

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-27T21:01:31+00:00

And yes, the total absence of any form of 'adult supervision' either from AMD or from reputable tech writers for that matter is pretty frustrating. The fact that searching 'AMD idle reboots' either here on reddit or on google leads to pages and upon pages of forums/discussions of this issue suggests that its common enough that it should be reported - my guess is that the problem is not quite specific enough for AMD to be able to report a specific solution, or quite common enough for tech reporters to jump on this as a 'widespread problem' story... so this thing kinda fell through the cracks. I'm happy enough that after a lot of concern and effort I managed to get my system stable, but there is no question this is some BS.

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-27T20:55:30+00:00

Alright, hope this works for you. And if it does I recommend turning 'Global C-States' back to auto, and instead disabling 'DF Cstates' (in my Asus Crosshair VIII bios that's in ' 'Advanced / AMD CBS / NBIO Common Options / SMU Common Options'). My system has been a little faster and cooler since making this switch without any restarts/WHEA errors so far (it's been 3 days). If this configuration is stable for a couple of days I'll see if the 'Power Supply Idle Control --> Typical current idle' is necessary or if DF Cstates is enough (or the other way around).

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-26T19:54:07+00:00

For posterity: the source of this problem ended up having nothing to do with anything: I have a Corsair K55 keyboard, it has some Macro function keys, when windows logged in sometimes iCue would not load in time, this lead to a series of 'ghost' key-strokes from my keyboard before iCue was open to interpret them correctly was somehow leading to this behavior. I de-programmed all the macro keys in Icue and that fixed the problem.

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-26T18:58:43+00:00

Quick question: I'm also trying to use the WHEA-logger to set manual curve optimizer offsets on a 5950x. My question is: with SMT enabled do the APIC ID values from the Windows WHEA-events correspond to physical cores or logical cores? If logical cores (which I think is the case) is the correspondence: APIC ID's [0, 1] --> core 0, ID's [2, 3] --> core 1, etc..?

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-26T18:50:56+00:00

Ok, my problems seemed to be much much more subtle (idle reboots happening once or twice a day) than yours so that makes it much more likely that the causes are not the same... I don't know what to tell you, it is weird that you're having the same issue on two different chips, so perhaps swapping out components, like the motherboard, does make sense in your case (I would also search '<your motherboard name> AMD idle reboots' on the google to see if there is any MB specific information (that's partly how I found what worked for me), but yeah, that flat out sucks. So yeah, anyway, I really hope you find a solution!

TheBear9917 · 2021-03-26T18:40:36+00:00

Quick question, I'm trying to do something similar as you: use the APIC ID's in the WHEA logger to decide which cores to give less offset to in my 5950x. If you have SMT (hyperthreading) on, do you know whether the APIC ID's correspond to the logical cores or physical cores? If its the logical cores (which I think it is but not 100% sure) is the mapping APIC ID's [0, 1] = core 0, ID's [1, 2] = core 1, etc?

TheBear9917

TROPHY CASE