Check your power supply or GPU status.
Check your power supply or GPU status.
Hi everyone, I've been searching for answers lately but haven't found the right info. System status: CPU Ryzen 7 3700x (wraith spire prism), motherboard MSI B550 tomahawk, RAM G. Skill Ripjaws V 16GB 3200MHz, GPU Gigabyte GTX 970 windforce, PSU Cooler Master v650 80 plus Gold (old semi-modular version).
Symptoms: Fans spin continuously (CPU, GPU, CPU, etc.), black screen with flashing _ in top left corner. VGA LED lights on and the screen turns off.
I live in South Africa. Two nights ago I experienced a power outage while gaming. The PC worked fine then. After shutdown, I turned off the UPS because it beeped. The next day, during a power cut, everything stayed on so I left it running. When I tried to restart later, the same issues appeared.
My concern is whether the GPU or PSU is faulty. I recently bought a used GTX 1080 that's confirmed working and might be available tomorrow for testing, but I don't have access to a power supply yet.
Usually a faulty PSU causes no boot or strange behavior, so spinning fans can help temporarily. This doesn’t confirm the issue is the PSU, but I’d try other checks first. For example, test with the 1080 model when it arrives. The blinking cursor suggests the GPU isn’t completely dead. Have you cleared the CMOS first? Then see if it boots using default settings. If yes, reconfigure your BIOS, for instance by enabling XMP.
End distractions and reset CMOS. No need to go into BIOS for this.
Thanks, I'll test it during lunch and check the results. I assumed it wasn't needed because the motherboard showed the GPU was faulty.
Clearing CMOS is typically the initial action in diagnosing issues. A BIOS configuration might prevent the system from booting and trigger symptoms such as CPU/RAM/GPU/storage or general errors. Resetting to the factory settings offers the highest likelihood of a successful startup. If this doesn’t work, further investigation is necessary.
I finished work and tried it two more times and it worked on the third try, I don't know if it will continue working but I have it booted for now which is nice. Thanks for the help Pandur. Edit: new problem. System takes ten minutes to start up and the bios is hectic laggy(think twenty seconds between keypress and action). I think it may be because I used my boot drive from my old intel system instead of reinstalling windows entirely. I am first going to reflash the bios to the newest version. This is all weird man, sketching me out.