- Apr 17, 2020
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I'm desperate, absolutely desperate and I have no clue what there is left other than buying an completely new system from scratch, which is just madness considering I upgraded 3 days ago.
Note this will be a long post since I'll be describing issues I've for the past 5+ years. But I'm literally on my knees begging for someone to help me finally fix this as I'm completely out of ideas after all this time. I'll put everything in chronological order. All the items that have been in various builds will be in bold since the only crazy explanation I can come up with is that broken parts keep "infecting" each other.
September 2014
In 2011 I built a rig with an i5-2500k, 8gigs of ram and a 560ti. In this rig I put a harddrive from the previous build I had and a new harddrive. In September '14 I decided to buy an EVGA GTX970 on release in the US (I'm from Belgium). I happened to be there on holiday and it was significantly cheaper to get it there than when I'd get back home. Once I got home I installed the GTX970 in my PC and it ran fine as far as I can remember.
January 2015
In January I decided I'd upgrade my entire rig. I'd "recycle" the two hard drives (1 was 4 years old at that point, the other one about 8 years), a DVD player and the EVGA GTX970. I assembled the following system:
October-November-December 2015
My Power Supply died. I temporarily used the one from the 2011 system to power my PC while I tried to get it replaced under warranty. EVGA obviously send me a new one for free but this had a weird rattling problem (
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aAwvonRTPw
) so I send that one back as well. The power supply I have nowadays is this one that I received November 2015.
Shortly after, I decided to make a Micro-ATX build for LANs. In this build, I put my i5-2500k, a new EVGA 550W GS, new HyperX FURY Series 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL10 DIMM Memory Module Kit - Black, ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 - 150 Watt Multicompatible Low Noise CPU Cooler, the only Micro-ATX mobo I could still find from a local store (can't remember the name but it's hardly relevant anyhow, just listing this to be complete about the journey every part has gone through), a new 256GB 850 EVO and my old 560ti. Whenever I'd use this build, I'd take my GTX970 and swap it for the 560ti.
All of 2016 - March 2017
The crashes still happened frequently, at random moments, random amount of times per day and always while gaming. On top of that I also got the occasional BSOD every now and then. I also got a really weird issue every now and then where I'd get a black-checkerlike pattern in the topleft corner of my screen. This sometimes would randomly appear, overlay everything and dissappear after rebooting my PC. I had a picture of this but unfortunately I lost it with the issues when installing my new parts this week. The picture below is a re-creation I did just now.
Things got worse towards the end of the year as my PC started exhibiting weirder and weirder behaviour:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlT_pXjQDzM
. Definitely not the signs of a healthy system. I kept troubleshooting and tinkering with some stuff but couldn't find anything that helped. Towards March 2017 I was getting stuff like this as well:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yV--ieU1lqA
. The crashes were happening more frequently as well alongside and games became pretty much unplayable.
As a last resort, I did another clean install (had done multiple at this point) and updated my BIOS from my motherboard. The BIOS update seemed to have done the trick as this partially fixed these issues. The situation post-BIOS update was as follows:
June 2017
The pump on my NZXT Kraken X61 broke:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd16a2_Ldkg
. I got a X62 for free under warranty. While I was waiting for it to be replaced, I was using the "ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 - 150 Watt."
Shortly after I also decided to push my system with the new cooler and OC'd my CPU to 4.5GHz. It remained like this all the way through.
The crash behaviour remained the same.
August 2019
Not much changed uptil early August 2019. Then my GTX970 officially wheezed out its last breath (not sure what happened, it just randomly stopped working completely) and I replaced it with a MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio. I was also getting tired of the old HDDs and bought a Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD and plugged both into my system. I took out the two old HDD's and tossed them aside, never to be used again.
The RTX 2070 displayed 1 bit of strange behaviour from the start: If I have my first two display ports, the setup would only work with monitor A in displayport 2 and monitor B in displayport 1. Monitor B did not work in Display port 2, Monitor A worked in both. However since it was something that is easily fixed I never really bothered to check what was up with it.
The crash behaviour changed and actually became consistent. I'd get one crash per day while gaming. The crash still happened in the exact same way as I described in the Jan '15 part. Most of the time, I'd crash in the first game of CSGO I'd play and afterwards I could just play without ever crashing again. The next day this would just repeat itself. It didn't matter if I put my PC in sleep or if I'd shut it off completely. One crash a day, nothing more, nothing less.
March 14-15, 2020
I decided that it was time to do a full upgrade of my system for various reasons (framerate in CSGO becomming too low as I want to get a 240hz monitor on top of trying my hand at VR (HL:A mostly)). So on the 14th of March the following parts arrived:
After I assembled the system I tried booting. Everything started whirring but the screen remained black and my displays said "No Signal." I messed around a bit with the display ports and also tried the HDMI port (knowing the issue my RTX 2070 had) but it didn't really change anything. Just to be clear: this also means I never got to the BIOS screen of my new mobo.
Naturally I assumed I <Mod Edit> up being lazy with the SSD. So I took it out of the new system and plugged it back into the old system along with my 560ti, the 550W PSU and the arctic cooler from my Micro ATX build to get it up and running. To my surprise the system wouldn't boot. I got the BIOS screen and afterwards I'd get a black screen saying:
When I checked in the BIOS it correctly found the 860EVO but it would just refuse to boot from it. I couldn't find any way to make it boot so I decided to plug it back into the new system and see if anything changed by now and it did! The new system would now display the same behaviour, meaning that I could access my BIOS however afterwards I received the exact same error message as described/screenshotted above. I also noticed that I made a small <Mod Edit> where I didn't properly connect my pump to my PWM fanhub, which caused the CPU to be 110degrees in the bios for a few seconds, though I instantly turned off the system and fixed that.
At this point I was like, <mod edit - watch the language> it, I'll just bite the bullet and reinstall my stuff. Losing the videos/screenshots would be sad (since it was stuff that I carried over from various hard drives, some stuff dating all the way back to 2005) but I couldn't be bothered since I didn't find anything that changed anything at all. So I inserted the Windows 10 USB and did a clean install. Everything went well, some stuff was even still available in the windows.old folder and aside from a small hick-up trying to verify my Windows 10 Digital License, all seemed good.
March 16, 2020
I fixed the Windows License and just set up the system entirely, ran 3DMark and everything seemed to be working fine.
March 17, 2020
Woke up at 09h00 for work, turned on my pc, made a coffee, went back to my PC to login to windows and noticed it was displaying strange behaviour. I couldn't press enter to put in my pincode. The screen went black, exactly how it was before when I booted it the first time after just assembling it (!) and my display said "no signal." I pressed the reset button, it didn't do anything so I flipped the switch on my PSU. Now I booted the PC again and it booted normal. I thought that maybe it was a small hiccup andI'd have a look at it later.
As I was doing some work and browsing reddit, I noticed that gfycat gifs with sound loaded really choppy, another indicator that something was up.
Next I played some CSGO and Warzone, which all went pretty smooth. I assumed/hoped that the hiccups were a one time thing as I had rebooted my pc already a few times and nothing seemed out of place. Note that I was also monitoring my temperatures constantly and both my CPU and GPU temps were fine.
After the game of CSGO, I decided it was time to finally try my hand at Valorant and played a game of that. And then it all went wrong again. After the match was over and the game went back to the main menu, my PC crashed in a way that seemed eerily familiar. Yes, you guessed it, the screen went black, I could still talk to my mates over VOIP, then everything froze, the last 0.01 Second of audio looped extremely fast for a moment but then there was a twist. Instead of restarting as my old build had done for the past 5+ years, the screen remained black and it said "No signal" on my display while I could STILL talk to my friends on teamspeak somehow.
Nothing what I did changed anything and I had to flip the switch on my PSU once again.
Afterwards I was back to the very first phase of this system once more: everything started up, I didn't get to see the bios and instead the display said "No Signal." Rebooting didn't change anything and thus the system became unusable again.
So my first thought was that the PSU was an issue. The CPU, Mobo and ram are all brand new, the GPU and boot-SSD are both less than a year old, the extra SSD is significantly older but it's just storage, the DVD player is just a DVD player and the X62 was working fine according to the temps I monitored. The PSU was 4.5 years old and I had hesitated to upgrade it as well since it obviously degraded due to intensive usage. In my layman's opinion I thought that maybe it was not supplying enough power for this new setup, which was causing the GPU to stop working which then in turn was causing the No Signal error.
So I started taking my system apart again. "Fun" Sidenote: I took off the glass sidepanel from my new case and for some reason it exploded in my hand, glass shards and cut my hand open, just what I needed on top of all of this
!!!
This worked out fine and next I hooked up my 860 2TB evo to a SATA to USB cable to see if I could read what was on it that way. Somewhat to my surprise this also worked out fine. I could access everything on it, without any issues. Next steps I took were putting the 860EVO back in the pc and attaching the 750W PSU again. Both of these steps worked out fine.
And that's basically the point where I'm at now.
All the parts are in the PC and running, windows is on the 850EVO and all my data that was on the 860EVO is accessible, the 750W PSU is worknig and I have no idea what on earth is causing these issues. Just booting from the 860EVO isn't working anymore, even though I didn't wipe windows of it yet and it working this morning.
I tried to find any crash report on the 860EVO but I'm failing to do so uptil now.
And that pretty much concludes my story. I'm truely desperate as I have replaced every single part (except from the DVD player, which may be cursed I guess) in the past 5 years, but I keep having huge issues with my system. Whereas some stuff (partially) fixed problems I had (like updating the bios from my old mobo, getting a new GPU made the crashes consistent and once a day), my latest upgrade seems to taken everything to a whole other level. I need to find a solution and I'm completely out of ideas as my system now is incredibly unstable and I absolutely cannot go through this routine on a daily basis.
So some questions:
Note this will be a long post since I'll be describing issues I've for the past 5+ years. But I'm literally on my knees begging for someone to help me finally fix this as I'm completely out of ideas after all this time. I'll put everything in chronological order. All the items that have been in various builds will be in bold since the only crazy explanation I can come up with is that broken parts keep "infecting" each other.
September 2014
In 2011 I built a rig with an i5-2500k, 8gigs of ram and a 560ti. In this rig I put a harddrive from the previous build I had and a new harddrive. In September '14 I decided to buy an EVGA GTX970 on release in the US (I'm from Belgium). I happened to be there on holiday and it was significantly cheaper to get it there than when I'd get back home. Once I got home I installed the GTX970 in my PC and it ran fine as far as I can remember.
January 2015
In January I decided I'd upgrade my entire rig. I'd "recycle" the two hard drives (1 was 4 years old at that point, the other one about 8 years), a DVD player and the EVGA GTX970. I assembled the following system:
- i7-5820k
- Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DD
- MSI Intel Lga2011-3 X99S Sli Plus 8x DDR4 12x USB 3.0 Gbe Lan Atx Motherboard
- EVGA GTX970
- EVGA Supernova 750W G1 Gold Modular Power Supply Unit
- Kraken X61
- Samsung EVO 850 256GB
- 2 recycled HDDs
- DVD player
- Cooler Master Stryker tower
- The crashes would only happen while gaming.
- My screen goes black. I'd still be able to talk to my teammates over voip during this phase which lasted 3-5 seconds.
- Next everything would freeze up, I'd hear the last 0.01 second of audio in extremely fast repeat (not sure how else to describe this).
- Lastly my PC would reboot.
October-November-December 2015
My Power Supply died. I temporarily used the one from the 2011 system to power my PC while I tried to get it replaced under warranty. EVGA obviously send me a new one for free but this had a weird rattling problem (
) so I send that one back as well. The power supply I have nowadays is this one that I received November 2015.
Shortly after, I decided to make a Micro-ATX build for LANs. In this build, I put my i5-2500k, a new EVGA 550W GS, new HyperX FURY Series 8GB (2x 4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CL10 DIMM Memory Module Kit - Black, ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 - 150 Watt Multicompatible Low Noise CPU Cooler, the only Micro-ATX mobo I could still find from a local store (can't remember the name but it's hardly relevant anyhow, just listing this to be complete about the journey every part has gone through), a new 256GB 850 EVO and my old 560ti. Whenever I'd use this build, I'd take my GTX970 and swap it for the 560ti.
All of 2016 - March 2017
The crashes still happened frequently, at random moments, random amount of times per day and always while gaming. On top of that I also got the occasional BSOD every now and then. I also got a really weird issue every now and then where I'd get a black-checkerlike pattern in the topleft corner of my screen. This sometimes would randomly appear, overlay everything and dissappear after rebooting my PC. I had a picture of this but unfortunately I lost it with the issues when installing my new parts this week. The picture below is a re-creation I did just now.
Things got worse towards the end of the year as my PC started exhibiting weirder and weirder behaviour:
. Definitely not the signs of a healthy system. I kept troubleshooting and tinkering with some stuff but couldn't find anything that helped. Towards March 2017 I was getting stuff like this as well:
. The crashes were happening more frequently as well alongside and games became pretty much unplayable.
As a last resort, I did another clean install (had done multiple at this point) and updated my BIOS from my motherboard. The BIOS update seemed to have done the trick as this partially fixed these issues. The situation post-BIOS update was as follows:
- The issues from the two youtube videos never happened again.
- BSODs stopped occuring.
- The checkerboard thingy from the screenshot above never happened again.
June 2017
The pump on my NZXT Kraken X61 broke:
. I got a X62 for free under warranty. While I was waiting for it to be replaced, I was using the "ARCTIC Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 - 150 Watt."
Shortly after I also decided to push my system with the new cooler and OC'd my CPU to 4.5GHz. It remained like this all the way through.
The crash behaviour remained the same.
August 2019
Not much changed uptil early August 2019. Then my GTX970 officially wheezed out its last breath (not sure what happened, it just randomly stopped working completely) and I replaced it with a MSI GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming X Trio. I was also getting tired of the old HDDs and bought a Samsung 860 EVO 2TB SSD and plugged both into my system. I took out the two old HDD's and tossed them aside, never to be used again.
The RTX 2070 displayed 1 bit of strange behaviour from the start: If I have my first two display ports, the setup would only work with monitor A in displayport 2 and monitor B in displayport 1. Monitor B did not work in Display port 2, Monitor A worked in both. However since it was something that is easily fixed I never really bothered to check what was up with it.
The crash behaviour changed and actually became consistent. I'd get one crash per day while gaming. The crash still happened in the exact same way as I described in the Jan '15 part. Most of the time, I'd crash in the first game of CSGO I'd play and afterwards I could just play without ever crashing again. The next day this would just repeat itself. It didn't matter if I put my PC in sleep or if I'd shut it off completely. One crash a day, nothing more, nothing less.
March 14-15, 2020
I decided that it was time to do a full upgrade of my system for various reasons (framerate in CSGO becomming too low as I want to get a 240hz monitor on top of trying my hand at VR (HL:A mostly)). So on the 14th of March the following parts arrived:
- AMD Ryzen 7 3700X WRAITH 3600 AM4 BOX
- GIGABYTE AORUS X570 AORUS ELITE
- Corsair 32 GB DDR4-3200 Kit memory
- Fractal Design Define R6 TG tower
- The NZXT Kraken X62 from June 2017.
- The EVGA PSU that got replaced under warranty November 2015.
- The Samsung 860EVO as my main SSD from August 2019.
- The Samsung 850EVO as my work SSD from January 2015.
- The RTX2070 Super from August 2019.
- The DVD player from 2011.
After I assembled the system I tried booting. Everything started whirring but the screen remained black and my displays said "No Signal." I messed around a bit with the display ports and also tried the HDMI port (knowing the issue my RTX 2070 had) but it didn't really change anything. Just to be clear: this also means I never got to the BIOS screen of my new mobo.
Naturally I assumed I <Mod Edit> up being lazy with the SSD. So I took it out of the new system and plugged it back into the old system along with my 560ti, the 550W PSU and the arctic cooler from my Micro ATX build to get it up and running. To my surprise the system wouldn't boot. I got the BIOS screen and afterwards I'd get a black screen saying:
Reboot and Select proper Boot device
or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key
When I checked in the BIOS it correctly found the 860EVO but it would just refuse to boot from it. I couldn't find any way to make it boot so I decided to plug it back into the new system and see if anything changed by now and it did! The new system would now display the same behaviour, meaning that I could access my BIOS however afterwards I received the exact same error message as described/screenshotted above. I also noticed that I made a small <Mod Edit> where I didn't properly connect my pump to my PWM fanhub, which caused the CPU to be 110degrees in the bios for a few seconds, though I instantly turned off the system and fixed that.
At this point I was like, <mod edit - watch the language> it, I'll just bite the bullet and reinstall my stuff. Losing the videos/screenshots would be sad (since it was stuff that I carried over from various hard drives, some stuff dating all the way back to 2005) but I couldn't be bothered since I didn't find anything that changed anything at all. So I inserted the Windows 10 USB and did a clean install. Everything went well, some stuff was even still available in the windows.old folder and aside from a small hick-up trying to verify my Windows 10 Digital License, all seemed good.
March 16, 2020
I fixed the Windows License and just set up the system entirely, ran 3DMark and everything seemed to be working fine.
March 17, 2020
Woke up at 09h00 for work, turned on my pc, made a coffee, went back to my PC to login to windows and noticed it was displaying strange behaviour. I couldn't press enter to put in my pincode. The screen went black, exactly how it was before when I booted it the first time after just assembling it (!) and my display said "no signal." I pressed the reset button, it didn't do anything so I flipped the switch on my PSU. Now I booted the PC again and it booted normal. I thought that maybe it was a small hiccup andI'd have a look at it later.
As I was doing some work and browsing reddit, I noticed that gfycat gifs with sound loaded really choppy, another indicator that something was up.
Next I played some CSGO and Warzone, which all went pretty smooth. I assumed/hoped that the hiccups were a one time thing as I had rebooted my pc already a few times and nothing seemed out of place. Note that I was also monitoring my temperatures constantly and both my CPU and GPU temps were fine.
After the game of CSGO, I decided it was time to finally try my hand at Valorant and played a game of that. And then it all went wrong again. After the match was over and the game went back to the main menu, my PC crashed in a way that seemed eerily familiar. Yes, you guessed it, the screen went black, I could still talk to my mates over VOIP, then everything froze, the last 0.01 Second of audio looped extremely fast for a moment but then there was a twist. Instead of restarting as my old build had done for the past 5+ years, the screen remained black and it said "No signal" on my display while I could STILL talk to my friends on teamspeak somehow.
Nothing what I did changed anything and I had to flip the switch on my PSU once again.
Afterwards I was back to the very first phase of this system once more: everything started up, I didn't get to see the bios and instead the display said "No Signal." Rebooting didn't change anything and thus the system became unusable again.
So my first thought was that the PSU was an issue. The CPU, Mobo and ram are all brand new, the GPU and boot-SSD are both less than a year old, the extra SSD is significantly older but it's just storage, the DVD player is just a DVD player and the X62 was working fine according to the temps I monitored. The PSU was 4.5 years old and I had hesitated to upgrade it as well since it obviously degraded due to intensive usage. In my layman's opinion I thought that maybe it was not supplying enough power for this new setup, which was causing the GPU to stop working which then in turn was causing the No Signal error.
So I started taking my system apart again. "Fun" Sidenote: I took off the glass sidepanel from my new case and for some reason it exploded in my hand, glass shards and cut my hand open, just what I needed on top of all of this
!!!- First I unplugged the 850EVO and rebooted, no change, still no signal, no bios.
- Next I swapped the EVGA 750W PSU with the 550W PSU from my MicroATX build. Even though both were equally old, the 550W PSU was barely ever used at all. It went to 3 LAN's and then my ex used the MicroATX to play sims once a week. I figured that may change something.
This worked out fine and next I hooked up my 860 2TB evo to a SATA to USB cable to see if I could read what was on it that way. Somewhat to my surprise this also worked out fine. I could access everything on it, without any issues. Next steps I took were putting the 860EVO back in the pc and attaching the 750W PSU again. Both of these steps worked out fine.
And that's basically the point where I'm at now.
All the parts are in the PC and running, windows is on the 850EVO and all my data that was on the 860EVO is accessible, the 750W PSU is worknig and I have no idea what on earth is causing these issues. Just booting from the 860EVO isn't working anymore, even though I didn't wipe windows of it yet and it working this morning.
I tried to find any crash report on the 860EVO but I'm failing to do so uptil now.
And that pretty much concludes my story. I'm truely desperate as I have replaced every single part (except from the DVD player, which may be cursed I guess) in the past 5 years, but I keep having huge issues with my system. Whereas some stuff (partially) fixed problems I had (like updating the bios from my old mobo, getting a new GPU made the crashes consistent and once a day), my latest upgrade seems to taken everything to a whole other level. I need to find a solution and I'm completely out of ideas as my system now is incredibly unstable and I absolutely cannot go through this routine on a daily basis.
So some questions:
- As I wrote this out, I realized that the DVD player is the only part that I never replaced, along with my main monitor (XL2420T from BenQ). I'll take the DVD player out obviously but could this (or the monitor) really have caused the issue?
- Does it sound plausible that the PSU is causing all of this, meaning that the second replacement EVGA send me (after the one from the video) was faulty after all?
- Is my theory completely bonkers that a "faulty" part could've "infected" other parts and that, because I keep reusing parts from old systems, this keeps transmitting the problem?
- Could something be corrupting my windows installation and is that why I keep getting the "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" error?
- Could this perhaps be virus related?
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