Continued from here
- Took it in last Tuesday, early this afternoon they called to let me know it was fixed
- New processor was bad, did not work with known good machines
- RAM was apparently loosely seated which was causing the lack of display. They said they were able to get it to POST (and installed the latest BIOS update)
- I took it home. It does not POST.
- I am taking the computer back tomorrow morning. If they can’t get it working in front of me, I am giving up and buying a prebuilt PC online
I had a friend who tried to build his own computer and it wouldn’t turn on. I looked at it and he had screwed the motherboard directly to the case without using the standoffs. This caused the motherboard to be shorted by being pressed directly onto the metal case.
Very common beginner issue, guides really should be more explicit about standoffs and what they’re for. Even after building several computers, just fiddling with the configuration of the standoffs is still a pain in the ass for me. For a beginner who doesn’t even know what the hell they do it’s a nightmare
classic mistake
I am giving up and buying a prebuilt PC online
just remember cyberpowerpc puts their own proprietary BIOS on their motherboards and then never issues an update for it and you have to do some wonky shit to change it to the version that the actual motherboard manufacturer updates
other brands probably do that too but I don’t know about other brands ot warn you dawg
Hmm is this for “their motherboards?” I bought my PC from them with MSI motherboard and everything was typical.
My only problem was when the water cooler died within the first year, I didn’t buy it directly so couldn’t warranty it and had to replace it myself.
In the process of troubleshooting the issue which ended up being the cooler, I did end up replacing my CPU through them and they upgraded it for free because the exact one I had was backordered
The one I’m looking at is iBuyPower
I hope I’m not about to make a horrible mistake, I did a bit of research and haven’t heard anything especially bad about them
Please don’t use iBuyPower. They are ridiculued for a reason.
I’m sure there are decent “pre-built that’s actually good” reviews online from like Reddit and GamerNexus and stuff. I wouldn’t look at it on a brand level but on a case-by-case basis.
Seconding what the other commenter said about GN being a good resource for prebuilts, TLDR: they are shit. If all you need is a GTX970 and AM4 board you could look at used enterprise systems on ebay or similar sites, you are going to lose the GAMER aesthetic, but you will be able to save a fair amount of money.
My computer was out of commission for a long while. Tried many things. Eventually I realized I had to, in the bios, manually change the PCI interface version. Probably because I have a raiser cable. Anyway computer do crazy stuff
If you end up getting a prebuilt sell me your broken pc.
Sounds good, it’d be nice to recoup at least some of the value.
Hope you’re able to get it running. One of the things I hate about the am4/am5 chipsets is how easy it is to unintentionally get them to do dumb shit.
Have you tried a different PSU? Sometimes they arrive pre-fucked and it’s a pretty easy thing to buy, test, and then return a PSU.
Have you been able to install an OS? When I built my PC I had major video issues until I realized the problem was that the mobo came with drivers on it that went to auto-install on start up but those drivers were old and fucked my video output. I had to go back to a fresh install, quickly stop the driver install, and then install drivers from the internet.
I have been using this computer since 2017, lol. The problems only started when I replaced the processor last week.
8 years is a decent amount of wear and tear on a PSU. Unless you really, really overbuilt (e.g., a high-quality 1200 watt PSU in a system that could never possibly draw more than 500 to 700 watts peak), capacitor aging starts causing things to get a little dicey after only 5 years or so. Meaning, if your PSU is rated for 500 watts and it’s beyond 5 years old, its real handling capacity has potentially diminished to the point where you’re looking at closer to half of its rated wattage, especially if it has been run hard or exposed to a lot of heat.
So again, try pulling your video card and see if it will boot without it. If it does, it might be time to start looking at power supplies. You’re deep into Ship of Theseus territory now.
Yeah to add on to this a friend of mine recently had his PSU fail after around 6 years. TBF his symptoms were different (pc would randomly shut off) but you never know. A PSU failure is a straightforward way to fuck up PC operation.
Does it power on at all?
Powers on, but either gets stuck on the BIOS splash screen or shows no output at all. One attempt out of about a dozen powered it on and I got to my OS login screen, but it’s a success I haven’t been able to replicate. When I turn it on, the blue disk access light, other blue LEDs, and the fans turn on, but the red power light for the motherboard rarely comes on.
Things I’ve tried:
- Reseating the RAM multiple times
- Unplugging PSU connections and plugging them back in
- Resetting the CMOS battery
- Unplugging all USB peripherals
- Unplugging the hard drive
Try to get into BIOS consistently with just PSU/RAM/Mobo
Add CPU and repeat.
Add the hard-drive and try to get into the OS. If there are any failures, reformat drive + reinstall the OS and/or try another hard drive.
Add GPU and anything else ancillary one by one.
If at any step you get erratic/defective behavior - you found your faulty part.
Might seem silly but Make sure your main power connector to the motherboard is fully tight and flush. Like ZERO space between the connector and MB. I had some issues with mine at first with the last build. It ended up being that main power connector wasn’t 100% rammed up in there even though there was the “click”. Like less than a fingernail space. It isn’t always obvious.
Checked that one.
Ahh. Oh well.
Interesting. What type of hard drive are you using? A failing SATA drive will do this, if you used a scavenged disk. NVME could be similar if the connector wasn’t fully seated when you screwed it down, or if you didn’t use the standoff spacer and flexed the drive board. (Seriously just spitballing and grasping at straws here.)
Based on a quick glance at the manual and some product images, that motherboard doesn’t have diagnostic LEDs (let alone the segmented LCD debug display), right? When you say “red power light for the motherboard,” what are you referring to? The power LED on the case?
Regarding potential reasons for oddball startup delays, I know socket AM5 processors (like mine) will sometimes do a memory timing re-learn on cold boot, but yours is an AM4, if I recall – those shouldn’t be affected by that behavior, so we can probably rule that out. I did see a few threads on
about B350 and X370 chipset motherboards that had absurdly long POST times, so I wonder if that was never addressed with your BIOS.Finally, are you only using the on-chip GPU, or do you have a discrete graphics card installed as well? I guess GPU initialization order could make it look like it’s not going through POST, especially coupled with absurdly long POST times.
Power LED on the case, yeah. There’s a separate graphics card (GTX 970, so an older model) plugged in. The HDD is a Seagate Firecuda 2tb SATA drive. It’s not that old and I never had any problems with it before, so I would be very surprised if it’s failing (but if it is, I at least have my important files backed up). I ordered a SATA-USB adapter online, so I’ll be able to check for issues with it from my work laptop when it arrives.
Have you tried booting it up with the discrete GPU removed? Even if it works fine on another system, Gigabyte’s (and ASUS, and MSI, and Asrock, depending on the lunar phase) BIOS can be a bit… Temperamental. All the AMD AGESA firmware changes that have been getting pushed out lately could have inadvertently messed up support for some random PCI Express devices, and I doubt that a GTX 970 is high on their list of cards to spot check when they do QA on these BIOS releases. (Speaking of which, do you know offhand what version you were updated to?)
And yeah, if all else fails, I’d try unplugging both the power and SATA connectors on the Seagate drive to see if that will get you to a BIOS splash screen. Sometimes a power surge or static discharge from handling is enough to fry the controller board on an HDD, and part of POST involves polling all of the attached SATA devices. A faulty controller on a drive can cause the motherboard chipset to sit and wait indefinitely for the drive to respond to a wakeup command. If it happens during POST, your PC just looks like it’s in limbo. (It happened on my wife’s PC a few years ago, and it was frustrating as hell to troubleshoot. Thankfully it was a secondary drive.) If it goes right into BIOS, do you have a Linux live USB stick (or CD/DVD) floating around to see if you can get that to boot?
Already tried it without the hard drive, actually, with the usual result. I was updated to the latest available version of the BIOS (F53i, released this September). No Linux USB stick or disc, unfortunately.
Trying it without the GPU sounds like the next logical step, but I have to confess, I didn’t build this PC myself and I’m not entirely sure how to remove it. I pop open the latch on the PCIe slot, but the GPU doesn’t want to come out, so I assume there’s another step I’m missing (probably unscrewing it from the case). I’ll poke around at it a bit more tomorrow.
Yep, there will be a screw holding the L-shaped metal bracket with all the ports on it to a slot in the case. First, remove that screw (usually a Philips-head, sometimes a thumbscrew if your case is fancy), and then there should be a tab on the PCIe slot to depress (or unlatch, depending on the style); that tab will either allow you to lift the card out or it will pop the back of it out of the slot altogether. From a quick image search, it looks like it’s the pop-out lever type. Those are super easy, as long as you unscrew the mounting bracket from the case first.
Just be careful, don’t force anything too hard, and you should be fine. That plastic tab doesn’t take much force (about as much as popping bubble wrap).
I’ll keep that in mind! Thanks for all your help.
Did you try reseating the ram? Driving computers around is not great for that.
Yep. Didn’t do shit.
Poop.
