Question What exactly causes my PC to fail to power on?

[JonathanSzekely]

After i power it on i have to reset it so it shows the MOBO screen and continues working. I just changed my psu from a Thermaltake TR2 S 600W to a Corsair CX750M, since the old one was getting very noisy and it just failed to get to the MOBO screen for good yesterday.

This is my config

The whole story is much longer and please keep in mind that i'm most probably cursed, since i'm not very knowledgeable and everthing i set to fix along the way i just made worse.

I'm here on a quest to try and make sense of whatever is happening so if anyone feels like heping me understand how everything works with explanations and information to look up for a noob I'd greatly appreciate it.

This is not nearly the only problem my PC has, but this is where i am now, after 3 months of me going crazy and it working worse and worse.

I do have a friend(he's very good, either a real professional or very passionate about it) who's helping me out rebuild it but he can only assist me so much. He says i'm seriously underpowered (recommended me a GOOD 800W, at least, and one is already on the way), but if i make the calculations online i should be doing well, and i find this confusing.

He also recommended me to lower the CPU and GPU use but i'm not sure i'm succesful, and me trying to downclock and downvolt the CPU resulted in things getting worse in the first place. How do i properly go about underpowering my components, if i can even do that?

 

[DSzymborski]

If the original PSU had been a good one in the first place, you actually would not have been "seriously underpowered." A Corsair CX 750 wasn't a poor choice for a 2080 because it was underpowered -- the idea that a 750W isn't enough for a 1600x and any single-GPU solution is patently absurd -- but because of quality. It's a budget PSU not something you use to power a $600 GPU. There's always the risk that you damaged something with the first PSU; the Thermaltake TR2s are notoriously low-quality PSUs.

You would've been absolutely fine with a high quality PSU. What is this new 800W PSU coming in? I wouldn't use a CX long-term in this build, but it absolutely would power this build if nothing else was wrong.

It's hard to say more because you only tell that there is a whole story of other things, but not what the whole story is. It might make more sense to just find a local shop and see if they can sort out what's going on; it sounds a bit like you're trying and buying stuff at random and who knows what your friend has done to this PC on top of all this.

That your friend thinks a 750W or a 600W even is "seriously underpowered" is an indication that he doesn't know what he's talking about. And if it were, the solution would be to not turn the PC on at all and get a proper power supply, not "lower the CPU and GPU use." For this reason, I'd advise seeking an actual expert.

At this point, I'd be rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. Get all the parts out of the case, breadboard the parts at a minimum to test, and replace the most likely parts that aren't working.

 

[JonathanSzekely]

Nobody said the 750W isn't enough for the system, what he said about this particular PSU was that just 1 in 3 is decent, but it should work.

The new PSU that's on the way (2 3 weeks, but i desperately need something that allows me to run my PC in a stable way) is Chieftec GPS-1250C. I know this is overkill but being frustrated with my situation i've decided i'm investing in futureproofing starting now and i plan on getting at least a powerful 8 core in the near future.

My friend has done nothing to the PC, he just assessed my situation after all my "experiments". I bought this Corsair because i need my system running in the meantime. I looked for other variants that were much better suited but if you can imagine this is the best i could find in my city yesterday evening(~500 000 people, also our country's "tech capital" lol).

The backstory is very traumatizing, i'll try to remember shortly (ofc it's suppressed by my mind, very unpleasant memories) and i'll share further details about whatever looks important to you guys.

Before i started experiencing problems, i was running 2 HD monitors, 3 months ago. I bought an ROG SWIFT PG348Q and Anno 1800 and started playing. The game was crashing on dx12, but i looked online and applied fixes until it didn't crash anymore. But my pc started freezing, hard resets were needed. I think i played a bit with drivers to no success before i messed up and i had to format all my HDDs and start fresh.
After format and fresh windows install i didn't have freezes anymore, but the game kept crashing. Some fixes involved downclocking GPU, and i figured since downclocking can solve problems and reduce power usage i should try it for the CPU as well.
I think i messed up again here (ofc), but i'm not sure to what degree. I was aiming to run 3GHZ at ~1V (i was thinking 1.05 V since my combination of components seemed to overuse). I thought that was accomplished by reducing CLOCK, and reducing VCORE voltage simultaneously. This are the lowest values i used, 280x clock speed and ~ -0.25VCORE voltage offset. Naturally, my pc didn't start ( found out later), since that was too low, since it seems the voltage adjusts itself based on clock, so that would probably mean i reduced it to about 0.65 ish at 2.8ghz, c-state disabled. I did use some + value offset but i think ~ +0.15, but that with 3.3ghz, since i just noticed if i reset bios to defaults the voltage will stay between 1.45 and 1.5, since the Turbo mode uses another 0.2, and i thought that was too much (google was telling me the 1.2 is the normal value).
By the time i learned this, the pc needed 3 restarts to power on, and i changed the PSU the next day to the corsair i have now. If i run 3dMark it will just freeze the image and when trying to close it the PC fully. Furmark handles the image but after i close it my pc will become so slow it will eventually freeze a few minutes later. What to do now?

 

[OllympianGamer]

Nobody said the 750W isn't enough for the system, what he said about this particular PSU was that just 1 in 3 is decent, but it should work.

The new PSU that's on the way (2 3 weeks, but i desperately need something that allows me to run my PC in a stable way) is Chieftec GPS-1250C. I know this is overkill but being frustrated with my situation i've decided i'm investing in futureproofing starting now and i plan on getting at least a powerful 8 core in the near future.

My friend has done nothing to the PC, he just assessed my situation after all my "experiments". I bought this Corsair because i need my system running in the meantime. I looked for other variants that were much better suited but if you can imagine this is the best i could find in my city yesterday evening(~500 000 people, also our country's "tech capital" lol).

The backstory is very traumatizing, i'll try to remember shortly (ofc it's suppressed by my mind, very unpleasant memories) and i'll share further details about whatever looks important to you guys.

Before i started experiencing problems, i was running 2 HD monitors, 3 months ago. I bought an ROG SWIFT PG348Q and Anno 1800 and started playing. The game was crashing on dx12, but i looked online and applied fixes until it didn't crash anymore. But my pc started freezing, hard resets were needed. I think i played a bit with drivers to no success before i messed up and i had to format all my HDDs and start fresh.
After format and fresh windows install i didn't have freezes anymore, but the game kept crashing. Some fixes involved downclocking GPU, and i figured since downclocking can solve problems and reduce power usage i should try it for the CPU as well.
I think i messed up again here (ofc), but i'm not sure to what degree. I was aiming to run 3GHZ at ~1V (i was thinking 1.05 V since my combination of components seemed to overuse). I thought that was accomplished by reducing CLOCK, and reducing VCORE voltage simultaneously. This are the lowest values i used, 280x clock speed and ~ -0.25VCORE voltage offset. Naturally, my pc didn't start ( found out later), since that was too low, since it seems the voltage adjusts itself based on clock, so that would probably mean i reduced it to about 0.65 ish at 2.8ghz, c-state disabled. I did use some + value offset but i think ~ +0.15, but that with 3.3ghz, since i just noticed if i reset bios to defaults the voltage will stay between 1.45 and 1.5, since the Turbo mode uses another 0.2, and i thought that was too much (google was telling me the 1.2 is the normal value).
By the time i learned this, the pc needed 3 restarts to power on, and i changed the PSU the next day to the corsair i have now. If i run 3dMark it will just freeze the image and when trying to close it the PC fully. Furmark handles the image but after i close it my pc will become so slow it will eventually freeze a few minutes later. What to do now?

1250w is insane and a complete waste of money. I ran a 3900x and a 2080 with a 550w supernova with no issues.
If you turn your PC on and the fans spin up but nothing comes on the screen and you have to hard reset it to get it to work properly then that sounds like you just need to disable the aio options in the bios.
You shouldn't need to undervolt or underclock a 2080 and what makes you think that would stop it crashing?

 

[DSzymborski]

Yeah, 1250W is crazy for this build. And a three-year warranty is yikes territory. I'm not sure why you didn't just buy a good quality 750W with a nice 10-year warranty. It's not future-proofing; the industry is very concerned about low power and GPUs generally use quite a bit less power than their counterparts in the same market segment from a decade ago. Chieftec's one of the brands to avoid, though this power supply at least appears halfway competent (it's a CWT-made one on a decent platform, I believe).

 

[JonathanSzekely]

@OllympianGamer My reasoning for underclocking is if the PSU isn't enough then if the components draw less power the PSU can be enough, is it wrong? I just googled AIO and what i found related to my MOBO is Amd Cool & Quiet, is this what i need to disable? I don't find AIO for my mobo, what does it stand for?

I'm not completely sure about what is happening with the PSU either, but i'm considering 4k gaming in the future, that's why i went with this kind of W for the PSU. I also got it for 170 Eur, so not a very insane amout of money, at least to me. Other than that what my guy built for me before was always rock solid and very fast, it's very possible i'm just understanding everything wrong and it comes off as very crazy. Other than that he mentioned he checked the pieces the PSU is built from and it seems rather good than bad. I think he mentioned Taiwanese pieces for this one, as opposed to other that have lower quality Chinese ones. Does this make sense?

 

[OllympianGamer]

@OllympianGamer My reasoning for underclocking is if the PSU isn't enough then if the components draw less power the PSU can be enough, is it wrong? I just googled AIO and what i found related to my MOBO is Amd Cool & Quiet, is this what i need to disable? I don't find AIO for my mobo, what does it stand for?

I'm not completely sure about what is happening with the PSU either, but i'm considering 4k gaming in the future, that's why i went with this kind of W for the PSU. I also got it for 170 Eur, so not a very insane amout of money, at least to me. Other than that what my guy built for me before was always rock solid and very fast, it's very possible i'm just understanding everything wrong and it comes off as very crazy. Other than that he mentioned he checked the pieces the PSU is built from and it seems rather good than bad. I think he mentioned Taiwanese pieces for this one, as opposed to other that have lower quality Chinese ones. Does this make sense?

So let me get this straight. When you launch a game your computer crashes? Is this with multiple games?
Is this black screen, blue screen or image freezing? Does the gpu fans still run or do they cut out when it freezes?
What monitoring programs are you running?
What ram configuration are you running?

 

[JonathanSzekely]

So let me get this straight. When you launch a game your computer crashes? Is this with multiple games?
Is this black screen, blue screen or image freezing? Does the gpu fans still run or do they cut out when it freezes?
What monitoring programs are you running?
What ram configuration are you running?

There are 2 main issues

1. I have to reset my pc from the reset button for it to start after powering on, because after 1 second of revving the fans the monitor will power on displaying a black screen. The fans still work but are dialed back down to idle values. The pc is stuck here unless i reset it from the button. On reset the fans rev hard for a second and die down fast, and the computer also makes some weeird scratch/screetch noises. Like old hdds?
2. When i made the post running 3dMark and Furmark tests made my pc slow down very hard/freeze. I used DDU in the meantime to clean reinstall the https://www.guru3d.com/files-details/geforce-425-31-whql-driver-download.html driver again since some people said this helped them run anno when nothing else would. I just run the 3dMark test and i closed it like a retard without saving the results to post here but i can run it again. This time it ran well, gave me a 10000ish gpu and a 5900 ish cpu score.