Question PC stopped booting, no display, keeps restarting

[Matt18112]

Hi everyone.
Yesterday I was overclocking my ram, when my pc suddenly stopped working, what did i do exactly? I decreased one of the secondary timings (tCWL) by 2 saved settings and pc booted normally, then i remembered that i also wanted to decrease tRC a little, i restarted pc to enter uefi and that's the last time i saw my pc working.

PC starts, fans are spinning and after about 30 seconds it restarts, no display, no speaker beeps. With unstable timings that ofcourse can happen, but after 3 restarts bios should go back to default settings as it always did, however this time it didn't, i tried to reset bios manually i disconnected all power and i removed cmos battery for about 30 minutes. As you can guess it didn't work.

I don't know if decreasing one timing could suddenly cause permament damage to ram or other components. I have 4 sticks of ram and ofcourse i tried all of them one at a time in different slots, none of the configurations worked. Dram voltage was set to1.4v. I tried some simple diagnosis, i unplugged all unecessary devices, hdd, ssds, fans, replaced gpu to rule that one out. I reassembled entire pc outside of the case, checked cpu for bent pins and lastly i checked psu with multimeter, it's almost 5 years old so why not, voltages i got were 12.42, 5.25 and 3.47 for 12v, 5v, 3.3v respectively, are those good enough?

The speaker is working correctly when i unplug all ram sticks it gives me 3 short beeps, but with any stick in any slot it is silent. Maybe the problem is that i have 2 different pairs of ram, both hyperx fury, but one pair is 2400mhz and the other 2666mhz and after i oc'ed them something went wrong?

I will need to get some 100% working ram to be sure, but if it is not ram then either motherboard or cpu. Just asking to be sure, maybe i missed something. Do you guys have any ideas?

My spec:
Ryzen 5 3600 4300mhz 1.3v
Asrock B450 Pro4 newest bios 4.80
4x4gb hyperx fury
Gainward gtx 1660 super
Thermaltake smart se 530w
Cpu, mb and gpu are almost 2 years old, the rest around 4/5 years old.

 

[Nicholas Skaruppa]

The ram speeds shouldn't matter because the 2666mhz should drop down to the 2400mhz so it doesn't cause any problems with speeds. I'm thinking that it could be the ram is recognized but either the motherboard isn't doing anything with it or the ram could have been damaged with overclocking it. Have you tried to plug the ram into another pc?

 

[Matt18112]

Today I got my hands on a working pc and unfortunatelly all 4 ram modules are working correctly, which means the problem is with either motherboard (more likely I think) or cpu. Maybe there was some data corruption in bios due to oc, or maybe it happened just because motherboard is really cheap and I should've not oc at all.

 

[Nicholas Skaruppa]

Maybe, you should grab the ram out of the working pc and if the ram settings are back to normal you could put them in your pc and see if that works. I don't think it will change anything but I have seen it happen

 

[Matt18112]

I tried that too and different psu just to be sure, didn't work. Does ram/cpu overclocking voids motherboard warranty? If no than i guess it's not that bad after all.

 

[Nicholas Skaruppa]

I don't think it should, I don't overclock so I can't help you there.

 

[Matt18112]

The problem was in fact with motherboard, I should get replacement tomorrow, I hope CPU is fine. One more question do I need to reinstall Windows if I change motherboard since I'll have different chipset B550 instead of B450? How do I remove old chipset drivers? Is there AMD utility of some kind to do that?

 

[Nicholas Skaruppa]

If your hdds already have windows you shouldn't need to reinstall it unless it might have gotten corrupted, and with the chipsets it should auto update or modify to be compatible to your motherboard.

 

[Matt18112]

Hard for me to believe, but I got brand new motherboard and it's still not working, but I see CPU debug LED is on, so it seems both were somehow damaged. No idea why CPU would randomly broke, no bent pins, no overheating, no overvoltage...