Computer suddenly shuts off during boot (and other fun problems)

leachyboy77

Honorable
Mar 9, 2014
16
0
10,520
So the computer in question is a desktop that I built for my girlfriend. She is a photographer and uses it for photo editing, in addition to personal use (web browsing, Netflix, etc.). She has been having strange issues with it for the past few months, and I've run out of ideas, so I'm looking for some help. Here are the specs: PCPartPicker part list
The only inaccuracy is that the PSU is actually Corsair's CX430M, so slightly less wattage, but still more than enough, and she has since upgraded to Windows 10 (and she has the black version of the case, but who cares). This was built in the spring of 2014, and nothing else about the computer has changed since then.

When she boots up the computer, the fans spin up for about two or three seconds, then suddenly the computer just shuts off, almost as if it's interrupting itself. It gives one of those internal "click" sounds as well, as if you were holding the power button to shut it off during normal operation. It then attempts to reboot itself, and this will just go on in an endless loop. She has to remove the power source from the computer, wait a few seconds, then try booting it herself for there to be a chance of it booting properly. If she doesn't restart the process herself, the loop of interrupted boots will go on forever. Sometimes this will only happen once, and she has told me that on certain occasions it has happened almost 10 times in a row before deciding to go through the entire boot process. Just last night, the count was six times before booting properly on the seventh try.

A problem that seems to have come about because of this is that quite often, after one of these rounds of interrupted boots, when the computer finally decides to boot fully it won't output any display data from the HDMI port on the back of the computer, so her monitor is just left blank. This leads her to have to shut the computer down and turn it back on herself, which risks the whole process of the interrupted booting happening again.

Another annoying (but admittedly less severe) problem is the loss of audio. The monitor she uses has built-in speakers, and when she finally breaks through all of the previously mentioned issues, her computer refuses to output any audio, which once again leads her to have to restart and risk this whole cycle repeating itself.

This is understandably infuriating, as it has added anywhere from 5-10 minutes of extra time fumbling around to the simple process of turning on her computer. Does anybody have any ideas at all? I have a weak theory that it involves power in some way, but that PSU shouldn't even be at half of its capacity when powering the system. A friend of mine suggested it may have something to do with the boot priority, and I can go into the BIOS and check to make sure that it's how it should be, but I don't see how booting from the wrong disk would cause the computer to shut off 3 seconds into the boot process or not output any display data through the HDMI port. He also suggested updating the BIOS, which I hadn't considered. Any help would be very greatly appreciated.
 
Solution
Sounds like a BIOS problem, try resetting it first and if it doesn't work try flashing it over a USB stick. I had my Gigabyte H270 Gaming 3 do this infinitely and I had to RMA it because I couldn't even get it to boot.

FluxCap

Prominent
Aug 2, 2017
12
0
520
Sounds like a BIOS problem, try resetting it first and if it doesn't work try flashing it over a USB stick. I had my Gigabyte H270 Gaming 3 do this infinitely and I had to RMA it because I couldn't even get it to boot.
 
Solution