Question New PC Wont wake up from sleep, and sometimes gets stuck at VGA light on boot.

[Harrada]

Hello, I just built a new PC in September and up until the start of November, it was running fine. Now all of a sudden, when I put it to sleep, and try to start it up again, all the lights come on, the fans start spinning , but the monitors never come on and it never actually wakes up. After a few minutes it will shut itself down and restart.

As a bandaid fix for now, I have disabled sleep mode and stopped using it. However, when I shut my PC down and then boot it back up, there is a 50% chance that it gets stuck in the VGA light and forces me to hard reset and initiate a boot failure.

I am at my wits end trying to figure out whats going on. The only thing I did before this started happening was update my bios to its latest NON-beta version (z790 Aero G version F9). Can anyone give me an idea on whats happening to my PC? At the moment I just feel like I am cursed or something.

PC specs:
19-13900k
RTX 4090 OC Gigabyte Aero
2x 32GB G.skill DDR5 6400hz
z790 Aero G mobo
3x monitors (two monitors + sensor panel)
Windows 11 Home

 

[Darkbreeze]

What is your EXACT power supply model?

What is your currently installed motherboard BIOS version?

EXACTLY which DIMM slots are your memory modules installed in?

After you build the system and installed Windows, assuming you did not simply reuse a previously existing Windows installation from a previous build, did you manually go to the product support page for your Z790 Aero G motherboard and download/install the latest chipset (Intel .inf installation, Intel Serial I/O and Intel HID event filter, so, THREE chipset related drivers), audio, LAN, WiFi and Bluetooth drivers for your board or are you relying on the generic Microsoft drivers for all your integrated motherboard hardware?

 

[Harrada]

What is your EXACT power supply model?

What is your currently installed motherboard BIOS version?

EXACTLY which DIMM slots are your memory modules installed in?

After you build the system and installed Windows, assuming you did not simply reuse a previously existing Windows installation from a previous build, did you manually go to the product support page for your Z790 Aero G motherboard and download/install the latest chipset (Intel .inf installation, Intel Serial I/O and Intel HID event filter, so, THREE chipset related drivers), audio, LAN, WiFi and Bluetooth drivers for your board or are you relying on the generic Microsoft drivers for all your integrated motherboard hardware?

Ah, sorry.

PSU is Thermaltake GF3 1200W
Motherboard Bios version is F9 (Sep 19, 2023)
Ram is installed in slots A2 and B2 as recommended by my Mobos manual.
As for the chipset, I installed all of that through Gigabyte Control Center.

 

[Darkbreeze]

As for the chipset, I installed all of that through Gigabyte Control Center.

That's probably/possibly your problem. Gigabyte control center, ASUS Armory crate, ASRock motherboard utility and MSI dragon center are ALL basically useless, buggy piles of garbage and they tend to cause FAR more problems than they solve. And I mean, OFTEN and FOR YEARS now.

We get plenty of users here all the time, literally, that simply uninstall that crap and whatever problems they were having go away, however, I would HIGHLY recommend removing it by uninstalling it, and then download and install ALL of the following again to ensure the correct versions are installed and that there are no questions about it. And in the future, it would be highly advisable to NEVER use ANY of the motherboard bundled utilities or any third party "driver updater". They are not necessary, are not required and do nothing but cause issues the majority of the time.

Intel Z790 chipset: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...9.8340.zip?v=29f88b8d4797d2bcb46dd944cf074171

Intel serial I/O: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...1.20_n.zip?v=c6c265788a4cc92a54d7f426934bb3ba

Intel HID even filter: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL....2.2.1.zip?v=501c4af1712f28b261ef22689bdda3e7

Audio chipset: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...9373.1.zip?v=b854eb706c3857f6aaa0f750d421606c

Intel LAN: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL....1.3.3.zip?v=8877879ecce6bd8776afa73d184ab41e

Intel bluetooth: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...70.0.2.zip?v=c01afa425dbbb8595e341b5c7d39386d

Intel WiFi: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...00.0.6.zip?v=0981fe7e5384f7d322e9db2300199467

Your current BIOS version is fine.

The other thing I'd recommend doing is disabling hibernation and hybrid sleep. This has tended to cause problems on a lot of machines ever since they introduced it way back in Windows 8.1 and the problem just got worse after the release of Windows 10. It doesn't affect every system badly, but the hibernation and hybrid sleep behavior on desktops can often cause the kind of problems that you are seeing. It will not have any effect on the machine still being able to achieve low power state standard sleep modes, it just won't hibernate or use hybrid sleep, both of which are totally not necessary or particularly useful for desktop machines anyhow.

Hibernation

Disabling Hibernation is very easy.

You do not want to do this if you have a laptop as Hibernation is essential when a laptop's battery loses charge and the system needs to safely save it's state. If you have a laptop skip disabling Hibernation and instead disable Fast Startup and Hybrid Sleep if you are having issues.
To disable Hibernation:

1. The first step is to run the command prompt as administrator. In Windows 10, you can do this by right clicking on the start menu and clicking "Command Prompt (Admin)"

2. Type in "powercfg.exe /h off" without the quotes and press enter. If you typed it in correctly, the cursor will simply start at a new line asking for new input

3. Now just exit out of command prompt

 

[Harrada]

That's probably/possibly your problem. Gigabyte control center, ASUS Armory crate, ASRock motherboard utility and MSI dragon center are ALL basically useless, buggy piles of garbage and they tend to cause FAR more problems than they solve. And I mean, OFTEN and FOR YEARS now.

We get plenty of users here all the time, literally, that simply uninstall that crap and whatever problems they were having go away, however, I would HIGHLY recommend removing it by uninstalling it, and then download and install ALL of the following again to ensure the correct versions are installed and that there are no questions about it. And in the future, it would be highly advisable to NEVER use ANY of the motherboard bundled utilities or any third party "driver updater". They are not necessary, are not required and do nothing but cause issues the majority of the time.

Intel Z790 chipset: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...9.8340.zip?v=29f88b8d4797d2bcb46dd944cf074171

Intel serial I/O: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...1.20_n.zip?v=c6c265788a4cc92a54d7f426934bb3ba

Intel HID even filter: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL....2.2.1.zip?v=501c4af1712f28b261ef22689bdda3e7

Audio chipset: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...9373.1.zip?v=b854eb706c3857f6aaa0f750d421606c

Intel LAN: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL....1.3.3.zip?v=8877879ecce6bd8776afa73d184ab41e

Intel bluetooth: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...70.0.2.zip?v=c01afa425dbbb8595e341b5c7d39386d

Intel WiFi: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileL...00.0.6.zip?v=0981fe7e5384f7d322e9db2300199467

Your current BIOS version is fine.

The other thing I'd recommend doing is disabling hibernation and hybrid sleep. This has tended to cause problems on a lot of machines ever since they introduced it way back in Windows 8.1 and the problem just got worse after the release of Windows 10. It doesn't affect every system badly, but the hibernation and hybrid sleep behavior on desktops can often cause the kind of problems that you are seeing. It will not have any effect on the machine still being able to achieve low power state standard sleep modes, it just won't hibernate or use hybrid sleep, both of which are totally not necessary or particularly useful for desktop machines anyhow.

Hibernation

Disabling Hibernation is very easy.

You do not want to do this if you have a laptop as Hibernation is essential when a laptop's battery loses charge and the system needs to safely save it's state. If you have a laptop skip disabling Hibernation and instead disable Fast Startup and Hybrid Sleep if you are having issues.
To disable Hibernation:

1. The first step is to run the command prompt as administrator. In Windows 10, you can do this by right clicking on the start menu and clicking "Command Prompt (Admin)"

2. Type in "powercfg.exe /h off" without the quotes and press enter. If you typed it in correctly, the cursor will simply start at a new line asking for new input

3. Now just exit out of command prompt

So whenever I install these drivers, I keep getting this popup.

https://imgur.com/L5cz2AX

View: https://imgur.com/L5cz2AX


Should I be concerned about that?

 

[Darkbreeze]

So, I can tell you why that is likely happening. I assume you are clicking on the file and then running the installer from within the zip file. You don't want to do that.

What you want to do is right click the file (Assuming you have 7zip or another file compression utility installed) and then extract it's contents to it's own folder. SO, for example, if the file name is chipset.zip you want to right click and select "Extract to chipset" which will create it's own folder and then run the installer from that folder. Running executable files from WITHIN a zipped folder can have various and undesirable results. Any zipped file that contains executable files should usually be extracted/unzipped/unrared before you run the installer it contains.

You'll want to make sure to extract to a different folder, named after itself which 7zip should give you the option for if you right click the zip file (Might have to click on "Show advanced options" or some such if you are running Windows 11 and haven't run the script to restore full right context menus) and select Extract do "folder name". Then after installation you can simply delete that folder and that zip file. But running from within the zipped folder often won't work properly.

 

[Harrada]

So, I can tell you why that is likely happening. I assume you are clicking on the file and then running the installer from within the zip file. You don't want to do that.

What you want to do is right click the file (Assuming you have 7zip or another file compression utility installed) and then extract it's contents to it's own folder. SO, for example, if the file name is chipset.zip you want to right click and select "Extract to chipset" which will create it's own folder and then run the installer from that folder. Running executable files from WITHIN a zipped folder can have various and undesirable results. Any zipped file that contains executable files should usually be extracted/unzipped/unrared before you run the installer it contains.

You'll want to make sure to extract to a different folder, named after itself which 7zip should give you the option for if you right click the zip file (Might have to click on "Show advanced options" or some such if you are running Windows 11 and haven't run the script to restore full right context menus) and select Extract do "folder name". Then after installation you can simply delete that folder and that zip file. But running from within the zipped folder often won't work properly.

Yeah, some of them were giving that popup after extracting and running from the new folder. So I was a bit concerned. I do like how it asks me if they installed correctly, like I would know. Lmao

I went ahead and did a restart after installing them, but my boot did end up stalling on the VGA light again, and a boot failure happened. This time however, it would not let me click "load optimized defaults" and instead just ended up freezing on the message. I reset it again, and it loading into the BIOS, but my BIOS looks different then before. After that, it booted like normal, but I worry the VGA issue is going to persist.

Should I consider a full reformat of my SSD and fresh install of windows if that shows to be the case? I assume if it happens still after all that, its probably a hardware issue maybe?