4 year old PC wont boot up all of a sudden, powers on and off in a loop

Mark A

Mark A

Mark A

Soldato
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Lancashire
Hi, Just wondering if anyone had any ideas on what could be wrong. I was using my PC last night and everything was fine, then today I tried waking it up from sleep mode and the fans spun for for a few seconds, then it all powered down and kept looping like that continuously.

I have tried unplugging everything, removing the gpu, removing the ram sticks one at a time and trying different slots, resetting the cmos and nothing has worked.

I can test my brothers PSU to see if mine has died, but is there anything else worth checking? It couldn't be anything to do with the mobo battery could it, with it being 4 years old. I'd assume it would still post even if the battery was dead?

Specs:

i5 4670k
Asus maximus VII Ranger
16gb HyperX Beast (2x8gb)
Asus Strix 1070ti
Seasonic X series 660w psu

Thanks for any help.

EDIT: The PSU is 6 years old I just found it in my orders on OcUK. 1 year out of warranty :(. I'm really hoping it is the PSU and it hasn't damaged any other conponents, but I didn't hear a pop or anything when I turned it on. Are Seasonic still a good PSU brand to go for a replacement?
 
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CMOS battery just keeps the volatile memory of the BIOS powered when the PSU isn't supplying power to the board so it doesn't matter if it's flat for the purposes of booting. Only time you'd notice a flat CMOS battery is if you turned off the PSU by the wall or its own switch, or if you disconnected it from the motherboard at which point your BIOS settings would be cleared.

It sounds like your PSU is dead, if not that then the motherboard.
 
Thanks, i'll hopefully be able to test my brothers PSU in my PC tomorrow.

I didn't realise i'd had this PC for so long, it seems like last year I bought it. I'm wondering now if this is a sign it's time to upgrade my CPU, mobo and ram anyway. Would there be much gain over my current spec if I went for the latest i5 cpu and DDR4 ram?

I just bought a 1440p 144hz monitor a few days ago and was a little disappointed with the fps in some of my games after jumping up in resolution from 1080p. Do you think the cpu could be bottlenecking the gpu?
 
Hard to say whether you should upgrade anything without numbers.

You need to benchmark the card on a few common benchmarks (timespy, firestrike, valley, etc) and see if the card is performing like similar cards. (Use one of kaapstad's threads in the graphics forum, he has a large list of specs and their scores).

If your CPU is overclocked I'm not sure it is much of a bottleneck at 1440p for demanding games. If you are wanting to hit 144fps to match the monitor on esports titles like overwatch I have a feeling you need all the CPU you can get because the GPU won't be fully loaded - you can test that by having afterburner running in the background and checking the GPU utilisation graph to see if it's low.
 
MartinPrince said:
I suspect motherboard, then PSU. Are there no error codes or anything? Does your motherboard have a speaker module plugged in?
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Yeah there is a speaker plugged in, but it doesn't even get to a stage where it could beep as it powers up, then a second later it powers down and continuously loops like that until I hold the power button. The only code that has time to pop up is 00, but it goes through a few codes during bootup, so I don't think that is the error code.

The motherboard leds are still lit, as is the power button that is on the mobo, so there must be some power coming from the psu still. I hear a click inside the psu, but i'm pretty sure it always did that when you first boot up.

My last Asus motherboard lasted me 6 years, then i built a pc using it for my brother and he had it a couple of years, then i sold it on ebay for £50 lol. I was hoping this fancy ROG version would have lasted longer than 4 years. Then again Seasonic are also supposed to last a long time.


Pulseammo said:
Hard to say whether you should upgrade anything without numbers.

You need to benchmark the card on a few common benchmarks (timespy, firestrike, valley, etc) and see if the card is performing like similar cards. (Use one of kaapstad's threads in the graphics forum, he has a large list of specs and their scores).

If your CPU is overclocked I'm not sure it is much of a bottleneck at 1440p for demanding games. If you are wanting to hit 144fps to match the monitor on esports titles like overwatch I have a feeling you need all the CPU you can get because the GPU won't be fully loaded - you can test that by having afterburner running in the background and checking the GPU utilisation graph to see if it's low.
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My cpu was clocked to 4.5, but it got a pretty low cpu score on Firestrike. I went from 120fps in Pubg, to 80fps after upgrading to 1440p. A few other games dropped from 80, to 60, but these were single player games like the Evil Within 2, so i'm not too bothered as it was still smooth. I probably should have gone for a 1080ti instead of the 1070ti.
 
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I tried another PSU today and it did the exact same thing :(. Would you say it was the mobo that is dead then and not the cpu? Anything else I could try?
 
If it was just the CPU I think you might be more inclined to get the board stopping at some kind of error code for the CPU.

You said you tried to clear CMOS, so that's one step ruled out. If the board has dual bios which is selectable by a switch then try the second bios incase it's corrupt, not sure I see anything about that on your product page though. It does seem to have USB flashback, perhaps try to reflash the bios to see if it's corrupt?
 
I think its the motherboard.
I had a Gigabyte Gaming GT that did exactly the same when new.
OC replaced it and it was fine for 4 years.
Unfortunately the replacement has started doing exactly the same.
I have a spare board so popped that in and everything is fine again.
 
Thanks, i'll give that a shot tomorrow. I just tried warming the mobo up with a hair dryer after seeing a video on Youtube and it powered up, but I didn't get a picture on my monitor with the hdmi plugged into the mobo. I then restarted it and it started looping again :(.

I guess I better start researching components as I haven't looked for around 4 years.
 
Before spending money, take the motherboard out of the case, inspect it, and test it. It's entirely possible a dead insect or something is causing a short.
 
Quartz said:
Before spending money, take the motherboard out of the case, inspect it, and test it. It's entirely possible a dead insect or something is causing a short.
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Its out of the case at the moment. I had a good look around and can't see anything obvious.

I just tried updating the bios using the bios update utility and it hasn't solved it unfortunately.

I guess my last option would be to take it to a PC repair shop, but i'm thinking with it being 4 years old it might just be better to upgrade to an i7 setup.
 
Just been doing some research on parts and it seems this couldn't have happened at a worse time with a possible die shrink around the corner. I assume he older chips will end up cheaper if that happens as it'll be a decent jump in efficiency. I'm not sure spending £400 on an i7 is the best idea now, but then again I just bought a 1070ti and a fancy monitor and wanted to game over christmas :(.

One other option would be to buy a used Asus Maximus Ranger mobo from ebay and just do a temp swap to keep my PC going for a while...

Otherwise I might just raid my savings account and get this lot:

Asus Rog Maxiumus Hero XI
I7 8700k
Hyper X Fury 2400mhz 16gb (2x8gb)

But I am not sure whether to buy a new PSU, or reuse my Seasonic 660w psu, with it being 6 years old. I know newer Seasonic Psus have 10-12 year warranties, so maybe 6 years isn't that old for a decent psu?
 
grab 9700k+ gigabyte z390 sli and 16gb team group 3000hz for same or cheap then Hero+ 8700k combo :)

is your current seasonic still in warranty by any chance ? I tend to change mine when warranty goes followed by a dead cable port
 
Mark A said:
But I am not sure whether to buy a new PSU, or reuse my Seasonic 660w psu, with it being 6 years old.
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There were alterations to PSU requirements with Haswell so a new PSU is probably in order.

Just a thought, but have you tried testing the motherboard with no CPU, no RAM, no nothing? Then test with just the CPU. Then test with just 1 stick of RAM.
 
I ran a corsair PSU for about 10 years. Honestly it's luck of the draw with PSUs but if it seems to be holding up well it's a quality brand so it'll likely be fine.

Did you try re-seating the CPU? Seems like you've tried everything else at this point.

Check out the 2xxx AMD Ryzen CPUs, AMD aren't useless like they were back when Intel Haswell was released. There's also rumours that there's going to be a big IPC boost on the next lot of ryzen CPUs and possibly a 10 core on mainstream which can be dropped into the current boards - just make sure you get one with decent VRMs.
 
Cheers guys, i'll look into AMD as well. I did notice they were a lot cheaper, which would be a bonus. If I do upgrade i'd want a decent jump in performance from what I have to justify the cost, so wouldn't want to skimp too much. At the time I built this pc the general consensus was that i5 was best for gaming and an i7 was overkill as very few games made use of hyperthreading. But from what I have read it seems that has changed now and an i7 would be a better bet. I'll have to look into some benchmarks for i7 vs the equivalent AMD.

Regarding the motherboard, even though this Asus mobo only lasted 4 years i'm kinda drawn to using another rog mobo, mainly for the looks, but I also like the features. I tend to make a PC last years, so don't mind spending a bit extra for a nicer looking board as i'll have it on my desk for hopefully another 4 years or more. I just hope asus have sorted their software out so it works with windows 10 as my current utility software bugged out when windows released the anniversary update.

There were alterations to PSU requirements with Haswell so a new PSU is probably in order.
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I got this PSU oct 2012, so its a year out of the 5 year warranty. Its gold rated and 660w, so do you think it wouldn't be up to the job of a new system? I was looking at the Seasonic prime 750w gold as a replacement, but as i'd ruled out the psu as the issue I was hoping to reuse it for now. But i guess an extra £135 for the psu isn't too much and will be under warranty for 12 years.


Did you try re-seating the CPU? Seems like you've tried everything else at this point.
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I'll give this a try in a minute if I have any thermal paste in my box of pc stuff. It'll be 4 years old though, so hopefully it hasn't dried up.

I did move case a month or so ago, but it all seemed to go smoothly and I haven't had any issues. It's weird how it has just died all of a sudden. I was just watching iplayer the night before then put it in a sleep mode and this happened.
 
Mark A said:
If I do upgrade i'd want a decent jump in performance from what I have to justify the cost...

I got this PSU oct 2012, so its a year out of the 5 year warranty.
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Then you should have hard time in swallowing prices of Intel for three years old architecture CPUs.
While that 3 year old Skylake architecture is only real IPC improvement step of Intel since your Haswell.
After that Intel has only cranked up clock speeds and finally when forced by Ryzen increased core count...
After stalling for decade and limiting advance of game development with all those dual core market PCs and four cores being desktop high end.

Really only advantage Intel has over current AMD CPUs comes from Intel's manufacturing node clocking higher than GloFo's node originally made for mobile chips by Samsung.
AMD's Zen2 (compatible with current mobos with BIOS upgrade) will bring healthy increase to IPC over current Ryzens.
And TSMC's 7nm node has been made for high performance from the start, likely giving decent clock speed boost.
So performance crown holder could easily change in late winter/spring.


That's not old age for good PSU.
It's PSUs using cheap capacitors which are at risk of dying to old age at that age.


Pulseammo said:
CMOS battery just keeps the volatile memory of the BIOS powered when the PSU isn't supplying power to the board so it doesn't matter if it's flat for the purposes of booting.
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Dead BIOS battery can cause lot more than that.
In my first ever PC it caused first floppy drive to disappear, only for it to return at reboot while HDD disappeared completely and only way to get PC up was booting from floppy.


Quartz said:
There were alterations to PSU requirements with Haswell so a new PSU is probably in order.
Click to expand...
Lower 12V idle draw was never any problem except for some garbage performance PSUs.
 
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