PC wont turn on - A challenging request

Hi everyone,

I would like to present you with a challenge. I am not a hardware specialist but I understand myself as someone with a fair bit of knowledge. Please be aware that I will provide you with as much information as possible but since my PC doesn't start anymore, I can only give the information I have available from the outside.

My build (2 years running in this configuration): CPU: Intel Xeon e3-1231 v3 Board: Gigabyte GA-H97-D3H RAM: 16GB (2x 8) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 GPU: Gainward GeForce gtx 970 HDD: 1x 256GB Samsung SSD (2 years old, only used for c: ), 2 Samsung HDD each with 1TB (2 and 4 years old). PSU: BeQuiet Pure Power 8 ATX 600W CASE: Corsair Obsidian 750D SYSTEM: Win10 64bit Professional (upgraded from Win7)

Introduction (what happend - in chronological order)

About 1,5 month ago I started having first issues with my PC during gaming. I am using 2 24" Samsung screens and while I was playing the 2nd screen just turned off. Sometimes it turned back on after a few minutes sometimes not. Normally restarting the PC fixed the problem. One day the 2nd screen turned off (as if shut off via power button on the screen) and refused to turn back completely. The screen has an own small power adapter and my guess was that it just broke. So I ordered a new one and meanwhile continued using the PC with only 1 screen. I kept working normally until a few days later I refused to turn on one beautiful Sunday morning. The night before everything was working smooth and normal, no problems at all.

Refusing to turn on might not be correct, when pressing the power button it did turn on but didn't boot. All fans worked, the hard drives made the small standard sound when turned on but the screens stayed dark and no boot happend. So I tryed turning it on and off for a few times and after a couple of minutes it worked again. I started normally as if nothing happend and during usage it showed not no problems at all. I ran a few diagnostic programs to see if the CPU, GPU and RAM were working normal - all looked perfectly fine. I thought it might have just been a one time issue. The next morning, same problem, PC wouldn't turn on again.

It was Monday, so I used amazon 24h delivery to order a new PSU, another BeQuiet 600W ATX 10 to check the most obvious reason. Unfortunately it didn't change anything, PC wouldn't boot during the first 5-25 trys. After a while it started again (running perfectly normal as before).

Since the PSU wasn't the culprit here, I ordered a new mainboard and new RAM to replace the old ones and to check if they might be cause. While waiting for the new parts i experimented a bit and tryed several things to determain which part might be causing the issue.

I did (an non worked): - Tryed several electricity plugs in the house to make sure that its not an unstable power supply. - Changed the external power wire. - Unplugged all unneccesary hardware (expect PSU, Board, CPU, CPU fan, 1 screen 1 RAM). I unplugged them one by one and tryed again and again, hoping that one might be the issue and I could use the minimum configuration to at least boot into my BIOS. Didn't work. - Changed the battery of the mainboard. - Replaced my Logitech G510 keyboard with a simple one. - Tryed a to boot from disk instead of HDD. - Made sure that the minimum CPU fan speed required for boot is lowered to a minimum in case the fan was too slow.

(Between some of these trys I managed to get the PC back on by trying endlessly. So I updated my BIOS, changed the boot order etc. to see if it might work).

Unfortunately nothing worked and the PC kept resisting. After a while I figured out that when it refused to boot, turning it off and changing the RAM configuration (2 RAM sticks - 4 slots) helped in 2 out of 3 cases. After I changed 1 RAM stick from e.g. slot 1 to 2 and tryed to boot it afterwards, it worked.

When the new Board and RAM arrived, I changed everything and tryed to boot the PC with a minimum hardware configuration required to start. ... Nothing happend, PC didn't boot. Fans were all running, Harddrives processing, but no boot. So I returned the parts (Thank you Amazon).

With my little RAM trick is manage to turn the PC back on with the old configuration and during the night instead of turning it off, I put it into stand-by where I had no problems the next morning starting it again. The only problem seems to be the initial boot, once running, everything seemed fine.

So by now I changed all critical hardware parts besides the CPU and couldn't find the issue. The fact, that the PC runs without any problems once booted, is interesting and makes me questions if the CPU really is the problem.

So I managed around 2 weeks this way without any incident, until today. While gaming again both screens shut off in the middle of the game while I was still connected in Discord and able to communicate. Nothing helped, so I had to press the reset button. I was afraid for a sec that the PC wouldn't start, but it started without a problem. So I went back into the game and it took around 30 minutes before it happend again, both screen shut off. I pressed reset again and this time, the boot took longer than normal but happend at the end. I got the screen saying that windows wasn't turned off properly etc. etc. . So I followed instructions, restarted to make sure windows starts normal. PC boots and the second windows should boot up, the screens turn off again.

I pressed reset for several more times, tryed to start in windows in safety mode but nothing helped, every time the system should boot, the screens turned off and the pc went numb.

So I turned it off, to check if anything broke inside (everything looks good) but now it doesn't boot anymore, at all. My little RAM trick doesn't work anymore and after a 100+ trys I gave up.

So.. now before I buy a new CPU I would like to know if I missed anything and if there is actually a real chance that the CPU is the reason for my problem?!

Please let me know if you have further questions or if missed mentioning critical information. Thank you very much for your help!!

Submitted July 29, 2017 at 09:23PM by MaybeLightart http://ift.tt/2uLJCbr