Turn on/off loop. Only clearing CMOS makes it boot.

May 15, 2018
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Hello.

My PC has been acting up the past few days and I'm eager to get this fixed. I'm writing this on my phone and its a bit of a reader so please bear with me.

The problem: PC turns on and fans spin briefly.(1-2s. Sometimes more). Then shuts down, turns on and gets into a turning on/off loop.

Some history:
Computer hit a bluescreen during gaming (system thread exception not handled, memory management, irql value not equal or less -all the errors I got during that day). So my pc shut down but it booted up fine so I kept gaming. A while later got another bsod and pc turned off and got into the loop mentioned earlier.

After that I opened up my rig and started looking for obvious things like loose cables etc. but no dice. So I left there for the remainder that day.
The problem in my eyes was the psu but I quickly got ahold of a different one and the problem still remained.
Then I completely took apart and rebuilt the pc with resetting the cmos and adding a stand-off. Pc booted up, formated my hdd and installed windows and the pc ran fine the whole day.

The next day the pc booted up fine once more but during gaming it gave a bsod and fell into the loop once more. Only resetting the cmos would make the pc boot and I would be greeted with a no signal screen (and a shut down after some time) or the windows login screen. In general if it does decide to work it will crash in about an hour or two and stop working.

Right now it sounds like the mobo but I lack the funds to replace it and am looking for other options.

What else have I done:
*Ran memtest86 with a 8gb stick and found 65k+ errors with the ram being in the second ram slot. First slot had no errors with the same ram. (Used to have a 2 gb in the second slot but removing it resolved nothing.)
*Installed older video drivers.
*Ran Cinebench to see if  the pc would crash.

Specs:
HDD: Toshiba 500Gb
GPU: GeForce 1050Ti
CPU: i5-4590 3.3 Ghz
RAM: Kingston 8Gb DDR3 (one stick)
PSU: Corsair vs550
MOBO: MSI H81m-p33

Thanks to everyone who decides to help!
 
Solution
Check the BIOS version, the newer one is 1.9 https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/support/H81M-P33 Usually if the PC runs fine, don't recommend to update the BIOS, but you can do it, if you want.

You can use the PC with 2GB RAM, but not the 8GB, I think the 8GB one has problem. Now you may test the 8GB RAM with the memtest86 again, if you got error, just contact kingston for warranty, that means you will get free replacement.
Thanks for the answer! For some reason I cant directly reply to you on mobile but anyways I'll try to get my rig running for a bit and do the things you mentioned. I shall report back when all's done!
 
Alright. So I reset the CMOS once, the pc turned on but no signal. Saw that gpu got power (fans spun) and everything. Second attempt, the same thing happened. Thoughts?
 
Okay. So upon installing the 2gb stick along with the 1050ti the pc booted. Right now I'm running memtest on the RAM to be on the safe side. I dont want to believe that the 8GB stick was the problem because memtest didnt identify any. Also I cant use the 2gb stick to get into Windows.
 
Microsoft lists the Windows 10 minimum hardware requirements as:
Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS

Because you had 2GB, you can but the PC will run very slow. And you said you did not get any erro when the 8GB is in 1st slot. So maybe try use the 2GB to run the PC, update the MB drivers, like the chipset driver etc.
 
Update. Installed the new chipset drivers. Replaced the 2gb stick one with the 8gb one. Tried to boot. Pc turns on but no signal. Im thinking of flashing the bios before blaming it all on the 8gb stick. Thoughts?
 
Check the BIOS version, the newer one is 1.9 https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/support/H81M-P33 Usually if the PC runs fine, don't recommend to update the BIOS, but you can do it, if you want.

You can use the PC with 2GB RAM, but not the 8GB, I think the 8GB one has problem. Now you may test the 8GB RAM with the memtest86 again, if you got error, just contact kingston for warranty, that means you will get free replacement.
 
Solution