A couple months ago I built a machine with a Ryzen 7 2700X and an ASUS X470 PRIME motherboard. I’m not sure if it matters, but the GPU is an older Nvidia GTX 1060. I’ve never had a strong desire to mess with overclocking so everything here is basically stock. I’m running Arch Linux on the machine.
Earlier today I left the house for about 20 minutes and when I came back the computer was turned off, but interestingly the mouse and keyboard were lit up and stuck, rather than cycling colors as they normally do. The power button didn’t do anything so I cut the power and upon turning it back on, the computer started working normally. I had been using it since then to do several things, but nothing too intensive. I started Quake II RTX and played it for 20-30 minutes when the machine suddenly shut off again, right before my eyes this time. The USB peripherals also turned off this time. Once again I cut the power and turned it back on, and this time the computer POSTed, but didn’t boot all the way to the desktop before shutting off again. I cut the power again and this time when I returned it nothing happened. The motherboard lights turn on but the power button does nothing and the machine does not turn on. I have tried reseating the motherboard, GPU, and CPU power connectors and removing the CMOS battery from the motherboard, but it’s still completely lifeless. I did notice that the VRM heatsink and the motherboard on the opposite side of the CPU socket were pretty toasty, but not too hot to touch, and definitely not as hot as when I run Handbrake for days on end. It surprised me since I figured Quake II would not put any kind of serious stress on the 2700X, I was running many applications in the background as I typically do but I don’t think they account for the heat as my system usually has well under 10% CPU load even with all those apps running. The only thing that was happening both times the system shutdown that isn’t running on that machine at all times were Steam downloads. Given all of this, my best guess is that my CPU is fried but I cannot figure out what could have caused it aside from overheating, but moreover I can’t figure out what could have possibly caused it to overheat. Does anyone else have any other ideas?
Sorry for the long rambling incoherent mess of an explanation of what happened, I’m freaking out a little bit right now as I am in no position to replace any hardware right now and I’m afraid I might have completely fried my brand new CPU. I’m also sorry if this is in the wrong section, I don’t frequent these forums but I trust the people here more than any other PC enthusiast community.
I personally think that it might be the motherboard.
Could be the cpu, but then you should get a cpu error led or post code error.
and basically the cpu fans and case fans should eventually just spin when hitting the power button.
Or it could be the psu as well.
If you have a spare psu laying around i would firstly try that.
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another thing you could try is taking the motherboard etc out of the case,
lay it on its cardboard box, and then test it outside the case.
This will eventually iron out ground issues with the case.
CPU’s are extremely robust, so unless the heatsink came loose then I doubt that is the issue. PSU and motherboard are most likely problems as mentioned above. If the PSU smells like death then it probably is dead. If not, it still could be an issue like a bad solder joint. Replacing a suspected bad with a known good is one of the easiest ways to troubleshoot a PC, and it’s usually much easier to find a PSU to swap in than a motherboard.
Given that it has acted wonky before and probably isn’t going anywhere at the moment, you could try to unplug it and pull the CMOS battery out overnight. I’ve had a few computers with motherboards on the way out where that temporarily got them going again. Assuming the PSU turns out to be good of course.
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THANK YOU! I noticed that the motherboard RGB lights would reset their cycle the first time I pressed the power button after restoring power, which had me worried that it was something in the board, but alas when I pulled the PSU from my home server machine and hooked it up to this one, it came to life. I don’t really trust that PSU (plus it has another use elsewhere) so I’ll be ordering another one. I didn’t connect a monitor and peripherals to it, so I suppose it’s possible that something else is burned up, but I didn’t hear any beeping or see any LED indicators, and the CPU fan was lit up and spinning away. Now that I think about it, I did smell a little bit of “death” last night, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from (definitely not any part of the board), and I can smell it very faintly from the PSU fan today. Clearly I made a mistake by assuming that a PowerSpec 80+ Bronze would be good enough. I’ll be replacing it with either a Corsair or EVGA 80+ Gold.
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Yup likely the psu then like i mentioned above.
Also the 80+ bronze, silver, gold, platinum standards on psu’s,
still doesn’t really tell me that much honestly.
Those are just efficiency numbers at a certain power load.
However paying a premium for a decent psu, will in most cases always pay off.
Because it’s likely that you could take that psu trough a couple of builds,
untill standards are changing.
I always recommend people to not cheap out on a psu and motherboard as well.
Those are pretty much the most important components of the system.
EVGA generally has decent psu’s.
Corsair’s aren’t bad either generally, although they did had some lemons in the past.
So it highly depends on the series.
Of course all you pay is the brand name, Corsair and EVGA don’t make their own psu’s.
I could also highly recommend to look at Seasonic psu’s.
Seasonics are generally slightly more expensive.
But they are very robust.
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I was following the thread eager to know what happened.
I’m glad it was only the psu (I’m planning on maybe doing a ryzen build very soon).
I realize that now, actually learned a ton about PSUs in my research into finding a good one. In the past I really never put a whole lot of thought into it and I built this particular computer on a pretty tight budget after giving up on my last rig since it broke down every 6 months. Ended up going for a Corsair RM650x that was backordered on Amazon because it was highly recommended in several of the places I checked and it was cheaper than most of the other recommendations I could find. Unfortunately that does leave me waiting until sometime next week but given my extremely tight budget and insistence upon getting something that’s actually worth a damn it should be worth it.
For what it’s worth, the PSU I was using that crapped out after 3 months was a PowerSpec from Micro Center. Don’t buy them. They’re crap. 
On a possibly related note, I did notice that under heavily threaded loads my CPU would throttle sometimes well below the expected base clock of 3.7 GHz despite being well within the expected thermal constraints. I wonder if that was related to this PSU as well.
Before they started to “rebrand” PSUs as their own, the early PowerSpec cases with an included power supply were either Allied/Deer(junk) or a debranded Antec Basics series PSU(you could check the certification number and it would list the real OEM).
Generally I don’t recommend store-branded stuff, your mileage on products can be good or bad. I would note their store-brand flash drives are typically AData models, store brand RAM tends to be either Hynix or Samsung and the SSD suppliers seem to change(one series if I recall was AData & another series was Toshiba).
I’ve had pretty good luck with Micro Center flash drives over the years, and honestly they’re so cheap that when they do break it’s no big deal to just buy another one (of course I don’t use flash drives for storing important data, mostly just for booting images from, file transfers are what networks are for).
I bought an ADATA XPG 8200 after Wendell did that video on it a while back. I really like it but wasn’t really ready to spend that much on another one for my laptop, so I grabbed one of the Inland ones (I believe these are Toshiba rebadges) and so far it’s also been pretty much great. It’s not quite as fast as the ADATA but it gets 80% of the way there for two thirds of the price. As long as it doesn’t crap out any time soon I’d say it was worth it.
I put my new power supply in and now the computer turns on and all fans spin, but there is still no video output. I also found that holding the power button, no matter how long, doesn’t turn it back off. Is my motherboard toast?
EDIT: There also appears to be no power to the USB ports.
I would try that out. If not then it may be the motherboard.
What is your ram config like, are you using DOCP?
Try running single stick clocked at a lower speed like 2133 mhz in a few different slots and see how it performs, if its good then move up to smaller steps like > 2400 > 2666 > 3000 etc and see if speeds are messing with it.
I’ve noticed that with the Asus X470 Prime pro it is really finicky with memory and it seems to be even worse on the latest Bios updates.
The only desktop DDR4 I have is two 16 gig sticks of G.Skill Ripjaws V at 3200 mHz. The machine is completely unresponsive (I assume it’s not even POSTing, no lights, no beeps, no heat on the opposite side of the CPU socket, and holding down the power button doesn’t turn it off). I also tried taking the motherboard out and putting it atop a cardboard box, removing all additional accessories, reseating a single stick of RAM in all four slots and tried a different graphics card. Still no signs of life beyond RGB and fans (both CPU and GPU) spinning. I also removed the CMOS battery from my board so whatever the default RAM config is what it should be using.
The next thing I’m about to try is reseating the CPU. Once again I’m left wondering if it’s the motherboard or the CPU and hoping it’s the former as that’ll be much cheaper to replace even though I really don’t want to replace either.
I’m pretty sure the fans on the 1060 are supposed to stop spinning under low load, and they don’t, which contributes to my theory that it’s not POSTing
Edit: Reseating the CPU didn’t help. 