Was in the middle of playing a game yesterday when my computer suddenly lost power, so sudden I thought I had a power outage for a moment. My computer then made a couple “click” sounds like it was trying to reset/power back on, then nothing. No response when I pressed the Power button. I don’t mean a failure to POST like you’d see when a CPU or RAM goes bad, I get no power at all. No fans spin up, etc.
There was no smell of ozone / fried PSU, but I still was originally suspicious of it being power related. I tried the following:
Plugged the power directly into the wall instead of my surge protector.
Replaced the power cable
Tried Eco mode on and off on the PSU (An EVGA Supernova 1000 P2, I think it’s called).
Replaced the modular power cables running from the PSU to the mobo.
Used the PSU tester that ships with the PSU. Basically, it’s a plastic piece that you plug the 24-pin connector in to. The PSU fan spun up when I did this.
Just in case, I grabbed a spare PSU my friend had and swapped that in. Still no dice.
The motherboard I have is an ASUS Maximus Ranger VIII. The motherboard has three buttons on the board itself for START, RESET, and Clear CMOS. When power is connected, the START button will flash every second or so. I DO still see this, but the Start button does nothing. The system remains completely inert, there doesn’t appear to be any attempt to power on at all.
Starting to suspect the motherboard at this point, I tried clearing the CMOS (both with the button and by removing the CMOS battery) but no dice. No power, no fans, no LEDs beyond the passively flashing Start button.
At this point, I’m looking to RMA the motherboard as I’ve run out of ideas. Replacing a motherboard is a giant pain in the ass, though (not to mention I’m down a computer until I get the replacement) so I thought I’d pop in here to see if you of you fine folk have seen something similar or can think of any other ideas before I take the whole machine apart and ship back the mobo.
I just had the craziest time this past month with a similar issue. What it ended up being was the jumper block ASUS gives you to attach all the cables like power led, reboot, power on, speaker, etc to the motherboard. It had an internal short so it would randomly send a power off signal to the computer. It was doing the exact same thing you described above, going from instant off and not being able to turn it back on to working for 5 seconds on 5 seconds off and so on
The weird part was how variable the behavior was because it was an intermittent short. Before I figured it out it was just instantly turning off. After I figured out it was the header block and wiggled the thing it would randomly do a full shutdown like you hit Windows->Start->Shutdown every day at 8pm. When I removed the block and just plugged things directly in it all worked fine for the past week.
This yellow thing is what I am talking about, though mine is black. The large one labeled HDD LED+, PWR/Ground and so on.
I’m not sure, I’ve never heard of logging at that level. Any idea how I’d get access to it, if it exists?
Very interesting, I’m going to try that out when I get home. Since the mobo has a Start button on the board itself, I should be able to disconnect all of those and at least see if I can get anything to spin up. Thanks!
Good call. I tried the GPU already, but the RAM is still in there. Since I’ll likely be having to pull everything out to ship it back as it is, I might as well remove everything part-by-part and see if anything changes.
I agree with the others here, you’ve isolated power as being okay, now you need to remove the other isolatable pieces to narrow it down further. Removing any cards and memory should at least get you beeps that isolate the state as such with things not present. Can you pull the mobo and place it into another chassis? Barring that can you pull a power switch from another chassis and wire it to your power/ground pins?
It does sound like the motherboard. That sucks too, as it’s always a pain in the rear.
I can’t get any power going whatsoever, so no CMOS menu for me. :( I’ll be ripping things out piece by piece when I get home from the office and see if I can get any life into it. If not… well, I gotta take it all apart to RMA it anyway, so might as well!
Well, thanks everyone for taking the time to offer suggestions. I tried removing components one by one, but nothing worked. Seems to be a dead mobo.
It’s under warranty buy unfortunately ASUS’ RMA process isn’t nearly as nice as my experience with EVGA. The latter let me put down collateral to ship a replacement immediately (to be refunded when they got the part), ASUS wouldn’t do that or provide shipping materials. It also looked like it would take a couple weeks to repair it and I unfortunately can’t be without my PC for that long, so I’ll likely just have to buy a new mobo.
I absolutely love their motherboard, I just wish the RMA process was a little more customer friendly.
It’s all good, shit happens. I’ve had nothing but good things to say about ASUS motherboards and this one was no exception before it crapped out. I’m going to chalk this up to just an unfortunate circumstance. Now if my next mobo has issues… well, I likely won’t be buying ASUS again after that. :)
I sure hope I don’t regret going back to the well with ASUS, but we’ll see (I’ve frequently used their motherboards for 10+ years and have been some of my favorite, so I’m going to write this off as a fluke for now). The replacement board arrives today. Just waiting to get home from work so I can put everything back together.
I hate this period where you’re waiting to get the new part integrated. “Was that the only bad part? Is it something else? Am I going to have to replace the CPU too?”. Bad motherboards are the worst!
