Question Strange PC behaviour, now it won't even display BIOS. Motherboard at fault?

TheOfficialEdge

Honorable
Sep 6, 2012
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10,510
I have a pretty typical self-built PC; i7 6700k, GTX 1070, an Asus Z170-PRO motherboard and two 8GB sticks of HyperX DDR4 RAM.

Yesterday I encountered some strange display glitches as well as my browser tabs/extensions dying. Originally I thought it may have been caused by the graphics card, which has been problematic in the past, but I noticed that all my browser extensions had been corrupted and needed repair & re-configuration.

I managed to get it to restart and had no more issues until this morning, when the same thing happened. Display issues, browsers dying, other software crashing. Thought it may be memory issues at this point.

When I tried to reboot, I received the overclocking has failed error message. I removed my overclocking and tried again; same issue. I expect this is just a catch-all motherboard error message.

I tried the following:
  • Re-seated all components and cables
  • Tested single RAM sticks in each slot (+ Asus MemOK! tests)
  • Shorted the RTC RAM jumpers
  • Reset CMOS battery
  • Removed all unnecessary components for booting to BIOS
No matter what I try, I cannot get it to POST, nothing comes up on the display. At this point I am relatively certain that it's a motherboard failure, but I'd like a second opinion before I go buying replacement hardware.