Hi Tomshardware,
I recently built a PC with the advice of the people here. As per the title, I have a problem.
The build at first went well, if a little difficult (bruises and cuts, and gods I hate the little front panel to motherboard thing), and I spent a few hours installing drivers on this and that, checked the idle temps which were fine, and started testing load conditions by playing a game for about an hour. In short, it was working. I did things on it.
Then the screen hung. I pressed reset. The PC turned on, off, and on again -- and then stayed on, but the monitor did not react and stayed "blank". All fans were running. Tried turning on and off a few times, the same result.
Ugh.
I went through the following troubleshooting steps:
1) Reseat RAM/GPU - no results
2) Took out CMOS battery, wait a few seconds, put back in (I assumed the whole installing a bunch of motherboard drivers from the manufacturer's website might have done the thing in) - no more turning on-off-and-on, just stays on -- but still black screen
3) Removed the GPU from the equation and ran the screen directly from the motherboard -- no good
4) Did the CMOS battery thing again; left out for a few hours this time -- no luck
5) Removed all connections except motherboard (+ cpu) and PSU itself, linking to the monitor.
6) Using my old computer, tested the RAM, monitor, and PSU. All work just fine. The PSU, moreover, is a gold Seasonic G series. It feels like it should survive an embassy siege.
The relevant culprits are therefore ASROCK Fatal1ty H87 board OR the i5 4670. Or maybe my brand new Corsair 500R case's power button is bad or something (but then it shouldn't have worked before, right?). I do not have any specialized tools to test them. I do not have another Intel board, especially not one for Haswell nor a spare CPU.
Both motherboard and CPU are bought from newegg. Both are still under 30 days.
Two side notes: When I first started the PC for the very first time, it did the on-off-and-on thing, but went on to work perfectly and never did it again despite numerous shutdowns and restarts until the black screen situation. Also, I have only gotten the aftermarket cooler just now, as of this post -- was using the Intel default cooler throughout this PC's young life. Don't tell me I should have waited... :I
P.S. No overclocking involved. Shouldn't have shocked the motherboard with my static either, given that the PC acted up when it was already working, safely guarded inside a mighty Corsair Carbide case.
***
TL;DR isolated the problem to the motherboard OR CPU.
Questions: I beg upon thy kindness -- halp. What are my options? Is there a way to test out which of the two things is the dead one, some sort of motherboard tester or something, or should I RMA both?
And if that's what I have to do (I'm thinking, if I RMA only the more likely culprit, I get to test with one "old" piece before sending it back if necessary), how do I go about RMA'ing with newegg again? Never had to do one before...
And how much do computer shops charge anyway if clients go in with "I troubleshot (?) everything except these two, plz hlp"?
(edits for clarification)
I recently built a PC with the advice of the people here. As per the title, I have a problem.
The build at first went well, if a little difficult (bruises and cuts, and gods I hate the little front panel to motherboard thing), and I spent a few hours installing drivers on this and that, checked the idle temps which were fine, and started testing load conditions by playing a game for about an hour. In short, it was working. I did things on it.
Then the screen hung. I pressed reset. The PC turned on, off, and on again -- and then stayed on, but the monitor did not react and stayed "blank". All fans were running. Tried turning on and off a few times, the same result.
Ugh.
I went through the following troubleshooting steps:
1) Reseat RAM/GPU - no results
2) Took out CMOS battery, wait a few seconds, put back in (I assumed the whole installing a bunch of motherboard drivers from the manufacturer's website might have done the thing in) - no more turning on-off-and-on, just stays on -- but still black screen
3) Removed the GPU from the equation and ran the screen directly from the motherboard -- no good
4) Did the CMOS battery thing again; left out for a few hours this time -- no luck
5) Removed all connections except motherboard (+ cpu) and PSU itself, linking to the monitor.
6) Using my old computer, tested the RAM, monitor, and PSU. All work just fine. The PSU, moreover, is a gold Seasonic G series. It feels like it should survive an embassy siege.
The relevant culprits are therefore ASROCK Fatal1ty H87 board OR the i5 4670. Or maybe my brand new Corsair 500R case's power button is bad or something (but then it shouldn't have worked before, right?). I do not have any specialized tools to test them. I do not have another Intel board, especially not one for Haswell nor a spare CPU.
Both motherboard and CPU are bought from newegg. Both are still under 30 days.
Two side notes: When I first started the PC for the very first time, it did the on-off-and-on thing, but went on to work perfectly and never did it again despite numerous shutdowns and restarts until the black screen situation. Also, I have only gotten the aftermarket cooler just now, as of this post -- was using the Intel default cooler throughout this PC's young life. Don't tell me I should have waited... :I
P.S. No overclocking involved. Shouldn't have shocked the motherboard with my static either, given that the PC acted up when it was already working, safely guarded inside a mighty Corsair Carbide case.
***
TL;DR isolated the problem to the motherboard OR CPU.
Questions: I beg upon thy kindness -- halp. What are my options? Is there a way to test out which of the two things is the dead one, some sort of motherboard tester or something, or should I RMA both?
And if that's what I have to do (I'm thinking, if I RMA only the more likely culprit, I get to test with one "old" piece before sending it back if necessary), how do I go about RMA'ing with newegg again? Never had to do one before...
And how much do computer shops charge anyway if clients go in with "I troubleshot (?) everything except these two, plz hlp"?
(edits for clarification)
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