Question Old pc in regular use suddenly shows black screen on start.

Nadrac

Honorable
Jul 22, 2014
19
0
10,510
Its an asrock B75 pro3 with i3570 and 7950.


I literally just went to sleep and woke up to a monitor showing black screen and pc running and every component seemingly working like normal. After failing to react to anything including to a long press of power button i decided to cut the power and power up again. First time this happened.


Monitors work.


Decided to connect the monitors to the integrated igpu of the cpu. Still black.


I tried starting with nothing but cpu psu and hard drives plugged in, and no peripherals either, albeit i left the drives connected.


Reconnected the wires.


I removed all the ram, and the pc didn't beep.


I decided to clear the cmos.


Couple times the pc had a false launch, and restarted after this. Kind of worried i messed up something but i followed the instructions for clearing cmos. At least before the pc powered up, and didn't restart at random.


After this i got 4 short beeps for missing ram.


After adding a stick of ram, i still got the same message despite previously using the systems 4 slots with 4 gb sticks just fine.


After reseating i got a new beep message, this time 5 short beeps, indicating the cpu is at fault.


Should i go ahead and reinstall the cpu?


What if that fails to solve it? Can it really succeed? I never heard of an old cpu suddenly needing to get reinstalled.


Is it the cpu is dead for sure, then why did the motherboard first not beep on missing ram?


Is it possible i missed something and the hardware is fine?


If anything i was planning to buy a better video card but otherwise keep the system. Unfortunately this is my main and only system and i need a quick solution.
 

Nadrac

Honorable
Jul 22, 2014
19
0
10,510
Now running old setup but only with one stick of ram. Bios did only recognize my boot drive and on windows start apparently it requires repair. I wait for that.
 

Nadrac

Honorable
Jul 22, 2014
19
0
10,510
Worth noting that the fans sound way louder now, maybe the default bios settings need tweaking. I didn't configure this system personally, and if anything they are cleaner now.
 

Nadrac

Honorable
Jul 22, 2014
19
0
10,510
Ok now i reassambled it like it was before with 4 sticks of ram and 3 drives and everything seems to work fine. My audio defaults were incorrectly configured but other than that like nothing happened.

The big question is what was the problem? Is it likely to happen again?

I suppose it's lucky that i embraced insanity and decided to retry the video card when the motherboard was screaming at me that the cpu is faulty.

Maybe something is actually up with the igpu because once before i tried to use a monitor with it and the monitor was simply black. I don't care about the igpu whether it works or not, as long as the rest of the system is not affected, and of course at the start my monitors were plugged into the video card. Wouldn't explain the initial problem.

The fan speeds are back to normal now too on their own.