Question PC cut out during use, monitor and hardware lost signal.

Jul 30, 2024
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Hello, long time lurker but finally had my own issue and hope to get some advice. I’ll explain the problem first then give some other details.

I was gaming for about 30 minutes yesterday when my screen went black. Monitor no signal, light on the mouse and keyboard went out. Monitor itself works fine - it will hook up to other computers as normal. But will not give signal on my PC. The mouse I can get a light on if I shimmy it in the USB slot a bunch but that’s not how it was before this.

The CPU and VC fans etc run fine, the PC physically appears to boot but no signals externally.

Another peculiar symptom is now I can turn the computer on with its normal button, but the same button won’t turn it off - even if held down - and I need to use the PSU switch. Again this is new problem that didn’t exist before yesterday.

I have tried reassembling the PC, re-cabling parts to PSU, testing monitor and HDMI cable (both fine on other devices), booting with 1 stick of ram (tried all combo of sticks on all sockets), confirmed it’s not a monitor/kb+m issue. I tried to reset the cmos because this seemed a likely culprit but this did not work - however I can’t guarantee having done this correctly as I never had before, I will likely try this again. I also tried to replace its battery with an old one I had lying around but no luck there either.

Not being the most expert builder, I fear I tinkered too much yesterday and want to get proper advice today before proceeding again, lest I fuck up my parts.

My suspicions: internal hardware issue, probably either motherboard or CMOS, but could also be dust damage somewhere - I found a little bit inside when I opened up, nothing too extreme. But I don’t know what I don’t know and the particular symptoms seem enough that someone may have come across them before and know what this relates to.



I built this PC maybe 5 years ago and did an upgrade about 10 months ago, with a new PSU, mobo and video card but leaving the old ram and CPU.

PSU: Gigabyte 750w
Mobo: asus a320m-k
VC: Nvidia rtx 3070
CPU: AMD 5700g (I believe)
Ram: 16gb 2 sticks
First 3 pieces are “new”, latter 3 are old.

Can provide pictures of interior on request

Thank you for your time
 
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Jul 30, 2024
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Thanks for the reply. I haven’t messed with any power options, but I’m also not too worried about the power button - I can turn the PC off at the PSU. I mentioned the new power switch issue as a curious symptom that might ring a bell for somebody with experience.

The real problem is that I get no hardware signals and can’t get a monitor display, so I can’t do any fixes that require me to actually have the PC on. If the screen was actually coming on I wouldn’t be worried.
 
Thanks for the reply. I haven’t messed with any power options, but I’m also not too worried about the power button - I can turn the PC off at the PSU. I mentioned the new power switch issue as a curious symptom that might ring a bell for somebody with experience.

The real problem is that I get no hardware signals and can’t get a monitor display, so I can’t do any fixes that require me to actually have the PC on. If the screen was actually coming on I wouldn’t be worried.
Remove the gpu and connect to the igp.....test.
 
Jul 30, 2024
4
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Remove the gpu and connect to the igp.....test.
Sorry, I didn’t mention it in the original post but in my rebuild troubleshooting I tried this - removed GPU, hooked the monitor up to the ig slot and no dice, it doesn’t help and monitor still gives no signal. This is part of why I suspect mobo or cmos problems and not graphics card problems. There’s only the one hdmi slot on the mobo so that could be separately faulty, or the integrated graphics could be, I’d never tried them before, but seems unlikely.
 
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Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
This:

"I was gaming for about 30 minutes yesterday when my screen went black."

Look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer for any error codes, warnings, or informational events just before or at the time screen went black.

There may be other errors etc, being captured as well.
 
Jul 30, 2024
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Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll definitely try this if I get my output signals working again. This wouldn’t work if I tried to hook up the monitor to a laptop and check its events there, right?

But if I wasn’t clear, my major problem is it’s still black today and I can’t get the monitor etc to return any signal or use the pc. I presume any possible identification of issue or fixing of that issue will have to be at the hardware level right now. And I don’t have a spare tower (only a laptop) or anything I could use to swap parts in and out of to try this troubleshooting at the windows level. BIOS screen, safe mode etc are all not reachable options at this time.

If I plug in the monitor hdmi it will flash a green light for a moment as if it’s functioning but then just give NO SIGNAL.
 
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