I've got either a failed cpu or mobo, is there anyway of knowing which without spending ££?

David_VI · 31 Mar 2020 at 16:34

Hi all,

I've got a Gigabyte Z97X-sli and i5 4690k.
The system wouldn't boot after I loaded a random old profile on the bios (curiosity).

The fans fire up then it goes off, and back on and off. I've tried removing battery, removing everything but cpu. Even totally gutted the system and breadboarding it.

I did a post in the motherboard forum but no responses...
I'm not really after diagnostic help now, (i believe I tried everything, even shorting bios chip to get the backup bios to take over).

I'm just wondering if there's a way of knowing what has failed as I would have sold the parts or made another build for a family member.

Is the only option to buy a cheap 1150 mobo or cheap cpu?

Or could anyone send me a spare mobo/cpu, or I send my cpu? A bit of an ask I know.

It's just doing my head in, especially at the current time. I ordered a new Ryzen upgrade last week anyhow, amazingly before this happened but no sign of it arriving till late week.
I can't stand not knowing what's dead, especially with all this time on my hands.

Cheers

Brizzles · 31 Mar 2020 at 16:39

Have you tried shorting the cmos pins with the battery in ?

2 pins above the front header panel , bottom right on board

David_VI · 31 Mar 2020 at 16:44

Brizzles said:
Have you tried shorting the cmos pins with the battery in ?

2 pins above the front header panel , bottom right on board

Yeah tried that, sometimes the monitor gets a dvi signal but then goes off again. I did once see a flashing cursor but the system went off before anything happened. Couldn't replicate it though.

Sometimes it stayed on for longer, like 8 secs rather than 3

EsaT · 31 Mar 2020 at 18:38

Get new battery.
That one is old enough to possibly cause problems.

David_VI · 31 Mar 2020 at 20:50

EsaT said:
Get new battery.
That one is old enough to possibly cause problems.

Would a flat battery cause problems like that? I didn't think a battery did more than keep the biro in memory

EsaT · 31 Mar 2020 at 21:17

David_VI said:
Would a flat battery cause problems like that? I didn't think a battery did more than keep the biro in memory

Anything is possible.
In my first PC (Olivetti brand) dead battery made first floppy drive disappear and at next boot HDD disappeared and only way to get PC up was booting from floppy.

Blue160 · 31 Mar 2020 at 22:23

The problem starting after a bios update would likely point to the board. Board failure especially during bios update is way more common than cpu failure.

sithlord · 1 Apr 2020 at 00:27

Ive had a cpu die a few times.. you dont get boot or anything.. just blank screen and fans on the case spin.

Sounds like motherboard issue.

David_VI · 1 Apr 2020 at 00:28

Blue160 said:
The problem starting after a bios update would likely point to the board. Board failure especially during bios update is way more common than cpu failure.

Board update could be loading a profile right? I have used profiles many times with overclocking. Seems wild that this one time it somehow killed the board. Especially the same week I ordered it's replacement!

mikey6 · 1 Apr 2020 at 11:43

Can you connect a speaker to the MB, to check for any error beeps to give you a pointer towards the failure?

David_VI · 1 Apr 2020 at 15:37

mikey6 said:
Can you connect a speaker to the MB, to check for any error beeps to give you a pointer towards the failure?

I don't have a speaker, I suppose i could get one as that's rather inexpensive

Seearbe · 2 Apr 2020 at 14:43

Only time I've had that sort of thing happen to me was when the RAM profile wasn't right in BIOS. I think I managed to get it to boot with just the two sticks or RAM installed and letting it do it's reboot cycle for a bit whilst hamming the button to enter BIOS.

FloppyPoppy · 2 Apr 2020 at 17:58

David_VI said:
Hi all,
I'm just wondering if there's a way of knowing what has failed as I would have sold the parts or made another build for a family member.
Cheers

First thing i would do that is cheap buy a speaker that plugs into the front panel IO ( i have checked your motherboard manual and it has a space for one ) - This will beep in a particular pattern ( think Morse code ) that indicates where a problem is occuring.

wookiee87 · 2 Apr 2020 at 18:06

my newly built ryzen system had the exact same problem as above, i loaded a ram profile which had some seriously tight trimmings which i didn't realize were applied, nothing i did would make the pc boot until i used a different ram kit entirely, then success, i got it to boot with a overclocking had failed error, press f1 to enter the bios, after setting the correct timings with my original kit everything's been fine.

so I'd start there if you have a spare kit of ram try that and see what happens, don't use your kit you have installed or use 1 stick, it needs to be a completely different kit