Hey, I am a pc enthusiast, I built over 20 computers in my life mainly for myself and some for my friends, I’m not a top notch expert but I have a grasp of what I do. I have solved a lot of issues so far but this one is being a rather overwhelming pain in the butt for a several days already.
To the point, I was a team blue since early 90s’ but I decided to switch and I composed this setup:
ryzen 9 9900x
kingston fury 2x 32gb ddr5 5200mhz running at 4800 speed not overclocked
Asus proart rtx 4070 super oc 12gb
Asus proart x670-e mobo
nzxt 850w gold psu (1,5 years old, from the previous rig)
arctic liquid freezer III 420mm AiO
fractal north xl case (it may gonna be relevant since Ive checked a vast majority of things already)
2x m.2 Lexar 512gb and 1tb ssds (512 is the system one)
4x sata SSDs that I took from the previous rig
Nothing is overclocked, I’m not a big fan in general, I preffer low temps and longevity of my hardware, I work as a videographer for living so the relliability is the key.
The building process was very straightforward, I updated the bios to the latest (2604), assembled everything together, wired and booted. Wonderful smooth windows 10 installation, everything rock solid from the beginning, software installed, all set up, fans tuned, benchmarks passed, thermals perfect, everything you’d expect from the best case scenario. BUT.
The next day (don’t know if that is relevant) before booting I just switched the 2 DP cables plugged to my gpu (I wanted the uefi/post to be on another screen), and after that when I tried to boot I experienced the sequence that ever since is my pain till this day. It happens absolutely intermittent and is almost impossible to say for sure that something may have an influence on that.
THE ISSUE:
I power up, ASUS board checks ram, gpu, gpu (3 q-leds flashing one after another), then the fourth should light up (either yellow or green for boot) but nothing happens. PC stays running but frozen in between the checking and booting.
I confirmed it has nothing to do with RAM/memory training, I left the pc running like that for the entire day and nothing changed.
The only way out and in 99% resulting in a proper boot is to press the power button twice, to shut down and boot again. Then everything works fine, bios posts, all settings are in place, no bios settings get wiped, there is no other post-fail-boot warning or whatever. Like it didn’t ever happen.
This issue happens quite randomly, I tended to believe that it was only a cold-boot problem but absolutely not. It happens more often the one or two boots after the first cold boot (after the night or a longer break).
Sometimes it indicates, that the next boot may gonna fail by the longer time-gap between the vga q-led and the green boot q-led that instead of lighting up immediately after the previous fades, teases me like it will never light up and then flashes onvr for a milisecond and PC boots eventually. The monitors will get no input over the time and will already go to power saving mode to finally wake up in windows, so I have no clue what’s going on, if the bios posts or not.
This sometimes can happen a few times in a row and sometimes will not happen for 20+ hours. Sometimes I could trigger it (I believed) by playing with the usb external hard drives between the boots. After unplugging the drive when pc was shut, It would not boot 1st try. But well, I was sure that this was the case but the other day it wouldn’t boot regardless not using any external hard drive.
What actions have been taken and what my conclusions are:
I tried another brand new mobo (the same model) and after the first boot (I left the bios rev 2007 on) everything seemed to be excellent. I was gonna call it a success but after a few hours I decided to flash the bios to the latest version and weird things started to happen, including the self-booting of the system that was kinda scary. I rolled back to 2007 that I thought it was stable but after that the issue I talk about came back like a nightmare. I figured that EITHER it was too early to call it a win and the issue was never caused my MOBO or, the latest bios has fried something in the new board that it did on my original one and now I have 2 boards that malfunction the same way.
I tried the below:
- running bios on safe defaults
- taking the battery out, clearing CMOS, flashing different BIOS versions.
- ErP on/off
- turning the possibly problematic 10GB ethernet adapter off
- booting with 1 ram stick (each)
- turning the fast-boot off
- disabling usb-legacy and usb-mass-storage in bios (significant boot stability improvement, but still problem persists - however ! - less often. After that troubleshooting is a pain, since triggering a failed bootup is undoable on any kind of “demand”).
- plugged in an extra CPU power cord (top left of mobo)
- paid in attention to the presumably faulty NVIDIA 4000 series cards power adapter that is known for causing a sporadic boot issues when not plugged perfectly (I found a huge post about that by some pc technician that had hundreds of mobos RMA’d over the boot failure that turned out to be 4000 series GPU’s caused).
- originally I had 3x m.2 drives, 2 operated by cpu and 1 operated by the chipset. I decided to take out the last one because I read that this x670 cannot handle these 2 m.2 slots properly which may lead into some booting issues. Later on I found another, absolutely different approach, that the cpu operated m.2 sockets can cause the problems so I should be using the chipset ones… I’m absolutely helpless here.
- I double checked my DP cables if they do not happen to have pin 20 wired.
AND: these are kinda testing in progress, but I am absolutely devastated by now, how long it takes, and I have a real life to care about…
- running PC only on 1 monitor via HDMI - couldn’t get a fail-boot so far
- running PC on iGPU - I couldn’t get a fail-boot so far
After the last night the PC booted amazingly well, but after a few consecutive boots it eventually failed. I found the boots with an interval of 1-2 minutes to be the most likely to fail.
But after this failed boot I’m running my pc on 1 x hdmi and 1 x DP plugs, and for the entire day I cannot cause it to fail again. But of course the issue is not fixed.
EDIT 1:
I just found a thread about the DP issues that I may be having. Some people and perhaps manufacturers claim, that having an old DP cable that is a few generations older than the new GPU’s output signal, may cause among others a hang on a boot. My DP Cables are quite old (at least 7 years old) and I did not choose them conciously to be some ultra high-end cables, I just wanted them to be VESA certified at the time. They may be dp rev 1.0.
I just recalled that upon many tests sometimes the POST and the BIOS would be pixelated like enlarged from a very low res, as the text was barely readable. It was very specific to the particular boot and intermittent as well.
UPDATE:
I am very c lose to solving the issue.
Over last 48 hours I’ve been using my pc with 2 monitors plugged in by 1x DP and 1x HDMI.
Both cables were of a typical quality, the PC worked perfectly, no hesitating on the boot anytime. The boot was 100% repeatable.
I ordered 2 new UGreen DP cables, certified for 8K. (I checked them with a voltmeter for a potential 20th pin wiring) So I took the HDMI out and continued testing my PC with 2x DP. The failed boot happend a few boots later.
And here comes my question.
Would it be true for RTX cards, that the DP cables have to be plugged into the certain ports? Or may it be my GPU that is faulty and cannot boot with a certain DP plugged?
I start a new stopwatch now, I moved one of the monitors over to another DP socket and I will try to achieve the fail boot again. If it happens I will consider replacing my GPU.
UPDATE 2:
I’ve been running a lot of tests and different setups.
All possible configurations where one of the displays was plugged via HDMI worked without the slightest issue. The boot happens to intermittently fail only when using 2 DP cables.
This happens also with a different GPU (new RTX 4070 OC - not SUPER) that has a different power socket so at the same time we eliminate the possibility of faulty NVIDIA plug/power adapter.
Now I will come back to my GPU and try setting the MOBO PCI-E Link speed to Gen 4 and see if that changes anything. I will also try out the new motherboard tonight. That’s my last hope.
Any help will be more than appreciated. Thank you so much for making it this far, I hope that this thread will help the others in the future.
Win 11 not that bad albeit 24 H2 update is doing its reputation no good 
Win 11 Pro for Workstations is pretty good. Adds RDMA so great file transfer. My 10gbe network used to transfer real world 600-700MB/s now just solid 1GB/s