[SOLVED] Concerned I fried my motherboard but no idea how that could have happened

Mar 10, 2020
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This past week I upgraded to a Ryzen 3900X and purchased a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master, and I also swapped into a new case (Cooler Master NR600). Kept everything the same: EVGA NEX650G, WD Green 2TB, Gigabyte Windforce GTX 970, and 16gb of DDR4 from Patriot (cannot remember the exact model/ clock).

This was intended to become a personal machine learning build so I didn't need to use cloud services, etc. It's currently running Ubuntu 18.04, and I wanted to swap over to Manjaro with KDE. I flashed Ubuntu onto a 32gb Patriot USB drive and installed off of that. Everything was working after I swapped platforms (kind of surprised this was the case; I came over from an i7 6700k and was not expecting it to pick up so smoothly between AMD and Intel, though I'm not incredibly familiar with all of this). I recently reformatted and re-used the same drive to try to install Manjaro. I'm on macOS so I was using unetbootin at first, and everything was working fine, however, I could not seem to fix the "unknown filesystem" into GRUB rescue when I booted off of it.

That was last night, and I threw in the towel to go hang out with some friends (classes canceled for coronavirus; defeats the purpose of the cancellation, I know). This morning I was doing some research on that to try to fix it and decided to try out flashing the image to the drive with balenaEtcher after seeing a few recommendations for it (and because I could actually use it on macOS without emulators/ virtual machines for Windows). My PC was plugged in, but not on. I plugged the Manjaro KDE drive into a USB 3.0 slot, and my PC turned "off."

As seems to be usual, when the PC is plugged but not on/ running, the power button on the mobo will glow and battery is running the system clock, of course. For this motherboard, it flashes for a bit when powered off and then will hold it's light steadily on (to my knowledge, this is not indicative of a problem, and I ignored it since everything otherwise seemed to be fine). When I plugged in the USB (before I even turned it on), that light immediately turned off. It was still plugged in, etc. but it won't even boot now... won't turn on... nothing -> I'm really worried that something happened to my motherboard. It's as though it's not plugged in/ receiving power at all.

Over the two days that it's been functional (only so much time to sit around and plug things in), I've noticed a few strange things--maybe strange is not the right word, but things, in my experience, that seem to not be 100% right. 1. When I would shut it off, it would need to "chill out" (it just needed to sit for a minute; definitely not cool, because it was running idle at 34C so cooling, etc. was absolutely fine) before I could turn it back on. Seemed out of the ordinary and I don't remember anything like this with Windows 10 or with Ubuntu/ other distros I've used. This period is when the power light on the mobo is flashing. 2. after flashing the Manjaro image to my USB, it felt unusually hot, almost too hot to hold.

Happy to provide any other information you might find useful, though this is pretty much everything I can think of right now.
 
Solution
Try resetting the bios, with the jmp (jumper) button on the mobo.
Look at the manual for it to see where it is.

II 0 (0 means normal spot for jumper) with tweezers move it over on the two pins like so 0 II.
Power on the cmputer to discharge any built up electricity, now unplug it for about 10 minutes or 15 minutes.

Come back to it and put the jumper back into the normal position, now plug in the cord and see if it will come on.
Just for the hell of it, plug in a keyboard and see if the mobo is giving commands to it by turning it on or flickering.

If it does this, that will indicate a cmos configuration error, could be over clocked cpu, ram or messed up profile setup.

Computers can be like cars at times, and some are very hard to...
Alright, turn off the computer for about 10 minutes, start it back up and boot into uefi bios.
Press the delete key or F12 key while the gigabyte splash screen is up.
Once the uefi bios is up, look at the temp and tell us what it says for the cpu, fans and drive temps.

Also when you boot the computer up, plug in the usb drive with manjaro/kde.
While the gigabyte splash screen is up, see if it will pick it up and go to the directly to the os or attempt to do so.
 
Mar 10, 2020
2
0
10
Alright, turn off the computer for about 10 minutes, start it back up and boot into uefi bios.
Press the delete key or F12 key while the gigabyte splash screen is up.
Once the uefi bios is up, look at the temp and tell us what it says for the cpu, fans and drive temps.

Also when you boot the computer up, plug in the usb drive with manjaro/kde.
While the gigabyte splash screen is up, see if it will pick it up and go to the directly to the os or attempt to do so.


My issue here is that it doesn't even turn on now--no LED indicators on the motherboard are on. It's like it's not even getting power.

Temps for everything are absolutely fine. Idling at roughly 35-40 C.
 
Try resetting the bios, with the jmp (jumper) button on the mobo.
Look at the manual for it to see where it is.

II 0 (0 means normal spot for jumper) with tweezers move it over on the two pins like so 0 II.
Power on the cmputer to discharge any built up electricity, now unplug it for about 10 minutes or 15 minutes.

Come back to it and put the jumper back into the normal position, now plug in the cord and see if it will come on.
Just for the hell of it, plug in a keyboard and see if the mobo is giving commands to it by turning it on or flickering.

If it does this, that will indicate a cmos configuration error, could be over clocked cpu, ram or messed up profile setup.

Computers can be like cars at times, and some are very hard to jump start some are easy to get it going.

If none of that helps, look up the number for gigabyte technical support and speak to tier 2 technicians.
https://www.gigabyte.com/us/Contact
They should be able to figure out or pinpoint the issue of a non bootable computer.
 
Solution