[SOLVED] No more video output.

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
Ok, so I've exhausted my usual troubleshooting options.

Tried bread boarding.

Tried a different PSU.

Haven't done anything with CMOS yet for reasons of not wanting to risk not being able to boot into BIOS permanently (an issue I had only once before but has made me wary of doing it again ever since)

So if there's any other options out there to try I'm all ears. Otherwise CMOS would be my last hope for this system.

Was working fine as per usual with my systems until trying to boot today.

No video. I literally get everything else though, system fans, RGB. AiO pump and fans, and even the GPU spins up.

But no post.

System specs are in my signature.
 

boju

Titan
Ambassador
Hmm yeah. The motherboard might've gone a bit silly with the overclock. Clearing cmos should be safe. The experience you had clearing cmos hopefully is a once off.

Things that you probably know. Before clearing cmos, discharge the motherboard/psu capacitors of remaining power by holding/shorting power on switch for 30seconds or so. And remember which side the cmos battery goes back 🤪
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
Hmm yeah. The motherboard might've gone a bit silly with the overclock. Clearing cmos should be safe. The experience you had clearing cmos hopefully is a once off.

Things that you probably know. Before clearing cmos, discharge the motherboard/psu capacitors of remaining power by holding/shorting power on switch for 30seconds or so. And remember which side the cmos battery goes back 🤪
Yeah. I'm aware. I don't think it's the overclock though, if had it stable at 4.6ghz for at least a year now.

I'm gonna do the reset today, I'll come back with results
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
Ok.

So a CMOS reset did nothing.

So I considered an option that I didn't think would be the cause, and I unplugged power to my HDD and behold, I got post and boot into Windows.

Shutting down the PC and plugging it back in results in the BIOS loading to post now, but doesn't get past post screen to boot into Windows.

The HDD also makes a little click sound every 2 seconds like how a CD drive makes the click sound every couple seconds when it has trouble reading the disc.

I would be quite pissed if this drive somehow failed on me seeing as how it is brand new and I bought it only a couple months ago.

So thanks anyways.

I'm going to make a new post about trying to save my drive.
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
Oh good. So guess now if it's not the hdd that caused it then id be wary of your ram and keep an eye on them when overclocking. Possibly switching them / reseat if this happens again.
Well I wasn't overclocking RAM. Just the CPU, (and GPU) and everything was completely stable during extended stress testing when I did it, and was fine for over a year until just now which made no sense.

It is budget RAM though, could have just taken a while before it started not liking the clocks I had on my CPU.
 

boju

Titan
Ambassador
Yeah just don't know for sure. I've had my 2600k at 4.5 for several years and ram left at default and can remember getting a blank screen last year. Taking one stick out and reseating brought it back. That's when i only had two sticks, bought another set for a different reason, lucky they mixed well.

System is pretty solid except for that one time, might happen again. Ahh well shait happens.
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
Sorry to unmark your post as best answer Boju, but turns out that wasn't the issue.

however, now I've come back with info about the PC.

So I took it to this place and they kept it over the weekend, however, their diagnosis was that the graphics card was bad.

I knew for a fact this wasn't the issue, so upon getting home with my PC today, I took out my power supply and hooked it up to my older PC and put my GPU in (reason is cuz the other PSU only has 6pin and I need 6pin+8pin)

And lo and behold everything works fine there so not the GPU.

They also said some weird stuff about being able to get into Windows but then it shuts off, however, I've never once been able to reproduce this, only thing I get is as I already stated.

So now this narrows things down to still being either RAM, CPU, or MOBO.

However, I am unable to test any of these components since I don't have spare parts lying around for this platform.

But it's hard to say what of these three components are the issue.

Could be the motherboard, but power is properly being delivered to all components on the board from what I can tell, but still.

Could be the CPU, but I wasn't getting any issues with freezes, crashes, blue screens or nothing before it just wouldn't post to BIOS upon boot.

Could also be the RAM, but I don't have a speaker on my board so I can't tell from beep codes, and the LED setup on my board doesn't seem to be there for error codes either, I've tried looking it up, and can't find anything useful.
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
UPDATE!!!.

I am dumb.

So I pulled up the manual for my board and did find what the led's indicate.

And upon further inspection with a flash light and a magnifying glass, I could see info printed next to each LED.

The LED that is lit up is for DRAM.

This leads me to believe that it might be as simple as dead RAM.

What do you guys think?

Here's the manual for my motherboard.
https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/...A/E11776_Z170_PRO_GAMING_AURA_UM_WEB_only.pdf
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
But couldn't you get into the bios after clearing cmos? Couldn't you do that again?
nope, that only worked the one time. could even restart the machine a few times.
But after using for the day and shutting down, it wouldn't boot again, that's why I took it to the shop because I didn't have extra parts to do the extra testing myself.
Turned out though that place was lame and misdiagnosed a bad graphics card LOL.
 

boju

Titan
Ambassador
Well if coincidence is a thing here and both ram sticks failed it's hard to know if it's a memory controller issue, motherboard dimm slots, cpu pins / bent or over tighten hsf or combination of any of those.

If it was me i would trouble shoot each stick separately clearing cmos each time starting with A2 slot and then trying each slot there after.
 

QwerkyPengwen

Splendid
Ambassador
I did that originally unfortunately to no avail.

These sticks were used in another system when I bought them.
They came out of a CyberPowerPC computer if I recall correctly.

Also, they aren't the kind that come in a kit, you can only buy them one stick at a time in 8GB capacities.
They are the Kingston ValueRAM 8GB 2400MHz. I expected them to fail at some point, just didn't think it would be like this and so soon. But then again, it's been aprox. a year now.