[SOLVED] Ground Fault or RMA'd MoBo? ASUS Prime X570-PRO

[Stuart Hamilton]

BACKGROUND:
A friend asked me to build his first custom gaming rig after extensive component shopping. I spent two evenings assembling the components and wrangling cables. There is always quiet optimism when throwing the switch on a new build for the very first time, and to my pleasant surprise everything turned right on. I shut it off, connected peripherals, and turned it back on, went into UEFI to check settings and verify the cooler was working and the fans were showing up. Everything was optimal. I then handed the rig off to him to install Windows, which always needs a bunch of updates before it becomes fully functional. It was late at night, so we decided to leave it running and let it update.

The next morning the computer is off, which can be expected when Windows is updating and rebooting, because sometimes a minor software glitch causes the computer to stay off. Unfortunately, upon turning the computer back on it exhibited ground fault behavior. It clicked, capacitors spun up, fans nudged a bit, and then nothing.

SPECS:
Ryzen 7 3700X Processor
ASUS Prime X570-PRO Motherboard
EVGA Supernova 750W Gold PSU
Gigabyte Nvidia RTX 2070 Super
Coolermaster ML240L V2 RGB AIO Cooler
16Gb RAM in two G.Skill 8Gb DIMMs, DDR4-2666
Sabrent Rocket Q NVMe M.2 2280 2Tb SSD
Corsair mid tower case

What Has Been Done:
Different outlets have been tried. Different power cables have been tried. All components and panel connectors (except the power switch)--including cooling--have been unplugged from all ports and pins on the motherboard (I left the block on the CPU so it would not overheat instantly in the event of successful POST). I was also afraid some thermal compound may have leaked down and made contact, which I could see no evidence of, but I gently scraped away the previous application and applied new. I could fully breadboard it, but remember, this rig was running fine the night before.

Evidence:

Video of current behavior

Pictures from the previous evening:

 

[SteveRX4]

Did any fault leds light up on the motherboard? ASUS Q-LED (CPU, DRAM, VGA, Boot Device LED)

It clicked, capacitors spun up, fans nudged a bit, and then nothing. - I'd like to see some spinning capacitors.

Remove all the peripherals and thedrives, cpu, ram and gpu and see if you get any wierd problems. Hopefully it'll stay quiet and you can add back one thing at a time till it hopefully posts.

 

[SkyNetRising]

I could fully breadboard it, but remember, this rig was running fine the night before.

Yes - do that.

Looks like short. Your friend might have attepmped to tidy up some cables and connected something, where it doesn't belong.
For example floppy power connector to a fan header on motherboard.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Oh, this topic is from September 15.
Probably should get closed.

 

[SteveRX4]

There's a lot that are old. Maybe Tom's needs to decide what to do with them. The posts that get tackled more are the new ones. It's not first served, it's last served. I think that's around the wrong way. Buit there's only a limited amount of problems that can be solved by limited resources.