Yeh, I don’t think that is worth your time, unless you can convince them to replace your motherboard too. They are not going to be very helpful when they find out you installed the drive anyway even after seeing it’s condition.
F******k!!! It was turning on perfectly yesterday 10 times and now I turned it on again and it’s stuck on code 94 again!
So in the hundreds of times that I’ve use memtest86, I’ve never once had it freeze up where there wasn’t an underlying configuration issue (xmp, timings, volts, etc) or a hardware fault. My suggestion is to keep testing and try to establish a baseline with repeated lockups. Then take note if it freezes again at 86%. If not, does it seem to freeze up sooner the 2nd time after the system is already warm? Have you tried a different DIMM in slot A1? Can you see if it will boot with a single DIMM in B1 and test again? And then try clearing CMOS and leaving all your settings at default (including XMP off).
And as a last resort, I’d try reinstalling your old GPU if you still have it. Since memtest86 doesn’t check VRAM I wouldn’t think it would directly cause a GPU fault, but there still is a slim possibility the card could be responsible.
I know this sounds weird to say, but hopefully you can get consistent freezing and narrow down the root cause. It’s possible whatever caused the lockup is also causing your post issues.
That’s the problem, there’s zero consistency, I can’t pin it down 
In Windows everything works perfectly fine, BIOS posts or not completely randomly. I tried it with so many combinations of memory sticks, GPU in different PCI sockets, SSDs in different M.2 sockets… Last night it seemed like everything is fine, I tried shutting it down and starting up around 10 times, leaving time between start ups and it worked fine. Today it’s messing up again with nothing changed.
I don’t have a different graphics card, but I think that has to be my next step. I’ll have to but the cheapest $30 GPU on Amazon to test it. I could order a new $500 motherboard to test it, but then I might have to return it, which is not a nice thing to do lol.
Is anyone in the LA area that can help opt or recommend someone to help? I don’t really want to go the Craigslist route, so what’s the best way to find a professional to help? Maybe I can ask MicroCenter to recommend someone, they seem reliable…
After stripping down the PC and testing it component by component, the issue is the M.2 socket that must have gotten damaged when the SSD shorted in it. It’s strange that it would still work fine if I managed to boot into Windows. But it would trip BIOS most of the time and didn’t let it POST.
The thing that seemingly made it harder is that the issue persisted even if I would remove the drive from that socket unless I cleared CMOS while the battery was out. So it wasn’t enough to take the drive out and try rebooting again…
Now after replicating it several times I’m 99% sure it’s the M.2 port.
The good news is, I still have a third M.2 socket I can use for the same drive and it’s working fine.
Hmm, so this did not resolve the issue, or did it continue having issues?
I think it is not likely, that you could convince best buy, that their drive caused the motherboard damage. It might be worth to have the crushed drive replaced, but apart from that IDK. I would not assume that they would cover a new motherboard, sadly. Althougt, that is solely from what I have seen here locally, in Finland, and some videos (GN, etc) talking about issues with retailers.
In short, send them a request to get a replacement drive, and also tell that the motherboard died because of that faulty, crushed drive.
This could be possible in opinnion as well.
And just to confirm, you reinstalled the CPU into the socket. I am assuming nothing looked off, while you did that.
Based on this info, I would have to guess, that the issue is that the short happened with some of the data-pins, and caused some damage to BIOS. I think that might also cause the error 94, due to damage with that section.
Sorry say this, but this is my best guess. Again, I might be totally wrong, but that is sadly my best guess. In this case however, IDK if the Cheapo Amazon GPU is going to help.
Ok, I’ve tried almost everything people here suggested and I have a new theory. It’s very unusual, but I think it makes sense.
There might be a hairline crack somewhere on the motherboard that makes it not start up until it’s heated, the metal expands and re-establishes the circuit.
Or GPU or PSU or CPU, but I hope not lol
Every time I cold boot it fails with code 94, but if I leave it on for a couple of minutes and restart, it will POST every time. If I only do a restart it will POST every time. If the weather is warm (I’m in LA), it will POST. Only when it’s cold, especially in the morning, it will fail with code 94.
You can imagine this made it impossible to test because the results are random and depend on the temperature.
I re-connected all the cables and sockets twice, so it’s not a loose connection, it must be a hairline crack somewhere. It might have happened when the SSD shorted or when I installed something, even if I’m really careful with my stuff.
So yeah, that’s where I am and will be looking to replace the mobo :-/
Thanks again to everyone who tried to help!
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That’s an all to common PSU failure mode, or mobo damaged by failing PSU. In my limited experience, it gradually gets worse over a long period, until a day in winter when it struggles to boot at all.
Yeah, except the PSU is only 2 years old, a Gold version and also rock steady with the system on full load running Prime95 and Furmark, so I think it’s the mobo
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I have the same problem as you do. Did you found a solution yet?
Probably PSU as mentioned above.
The 3970X can easily draw 400-450w when stressed. Add a 1660 super OC card and you are at ~650W. That is enough to pull a 750W PSU to their limit.
Hey, I finally think I “fixed” the issue.
I bought a new PSU, going from 750W gold to 850W gold.
The 750 was perfectly stable when loaded to the max with Prime95 and Furmark running simultaneously, so I didn’t think that would be an issue, but I tried buying the new one anyway. It didn’t help at all.
What did help is turning off Fast Boot option in BIOS! For now I have no issues, but it’s only been a few days, so let’s see how it goes.
The PC is not really booting any slower as far as I can tell and it’s all running well. I also don’t know why it helps exactly, but it looks like it does.
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Actually, nope. It’s been working fine for like a week and now it sometimes get stuck on POST.
Does anyone know a reliable person that I can pay to figure this out in LA area?
The problem is the xpg s70 blade. I have the same exact problem. Random cold boots, won’t post. Restart with the case power button and it will post every time.
My drive is not recognized on the first cold boot when it goes into bios bit after successful post o can restart and go into bios and see my s70 blade recognized.
I thought it was my 12 year old s12d 850w SeaSonic PSU. It was not.
I5 12400f - vetroo v5 cooler
2x8 gb Kinston fury beast RGB 3600mhz
MSI mag mortar ddr4 wifi
Asus tuf 6700xt OC
Adata xpg s70 blade 1tb with latest firmware
Strix 750w PSU made by SeaSonic, 1 month old.
check your drive boot order in bios.
you had your case open and pulled out parts. so you may bave changed the order in which your disks have been connected.
the bios may be trying to read from a boot drive thats now attached to another sata port.
so bios cant see it as a boot device.
or your bios battery might need replacing.
if its dying your bios will randomly reset to default.
which again may change your boot order.
and when you warm reset/restart, there’s now enough power in the system to boot the cmos to load your bios settings and start the machine properly.
another symptom to look for at cold boot look at the date and time…
if its incorrect you need a new battery.
I had a similar problem when pin 20 enabled dp cable was feeding 3.3v into my computer and starting things in the wrong order. Cold boots would fail, but resets worked just fine.
Old thread but I might have some thoughts too in case it helps anyone else around here -
It sounds to me like there’s a badly behaving device on some bus that’s failing to respond in some way at boot:
My understanding is that the ASUS UEFI (and most other ones, for that matter) is built on some version of the AMI APTIO UEFI, for which you can look up the diagnostic codes it spits out in a lot more detail than most manufacturer will typically give you - SuperMicro has a good reference available.
So yeah - if all the assumptions above are accurate, I’d say something like an NVMe drive is having trouble enumerating/etc. Could be poor signal integrity, or just a bad controller, or whatever. It looks like the first level console I/O is installed right after the PCIe bus enumerates, so I’d wager that you just have a blank screen when it hangs on 0x94.
If you do get it to load into Windows, check the Event Log and if there are an assload of WHEA corrected errors coming from one of the PCIe root complexes, you’ve found your problem.
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