Error light appears during shutdown or power cycle
Error light appears during shutdown or power cycle
Not enough information provided. Please clarify the device model and details about the problem.
I've experienced quite some unpredictable issues with my computer over the past year. Perhaps you can help me find the right path. It's probably around a year ago when things started acting up. My machine still uses the same parts it does now. I was running a 5700 XT thicc III ultra and recently switched from a Ryzen 5 1600x to a Ryzen 7 3700x. Everything seemed fine then, especially since I was playing Call of Duty Cold War with a friend. I pushed the processor to around 4.2 GHz and used HyperX RAM with XMP settings at 3200 MHz—performance stayed steady for about six months.
Then random driver problems began, likely due to the powerful Radeon drivers. Despite these hiccups, I managed to keep them under control and didn’t let it bother me too much. But then I noticed more frequent hard restarts, especially while gaming. They would occur only during intense sessions, and eventually I realized something was wrong. No blue screens—just a black screen followed by a reboot.
I tried various fixes but nothing resolved the issue until I returned all components to their original speeds. At that point, things seemed normal again. It was surprising how quickly stability returned after months of consistency. However, once the clock speeds increased, the problems reappeared. For some time, games ran smoothly, but crashes returned later.
I couldn’t reproduce the issues through stress tests like Cinebench or 3DMark. Recently, I experimented with more optimized memory sticks, including a Hyperx 3600 at 3600 MHz. This was an upgrade from my previous RAM, which had passed MemTest86. I reverted to standard speeds and updated my BIOS. The system felt much snappier without XMP, but the problems persisted.
Playing Halo Infinite caused another restart. Since then, I've been troubleshooting various things: I disabled legacy support in favor of UEFI, reset my RAM, updated the BIOS, reinstalled Windows 10, and even got a G2A key for extra settings. Recently, I played Halo Infinite without any restarts or crashes—what could be missing? Here are some wild ideas I’ve considered: Could a faulty PSU be causing these random restarts? Is my motherboard outdated for the hardware? Might the CPU itself be the culprit? Why does stability drop so quickly and unpredictably?
Details about specs: CPU – Ryzen 7 3700X; GPU – Radeon RX 5700XT Thicc III Ultra; PSU – Corsair 750W semi-modular; RAM – Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 3600 MHz 32GB; Drives – 2TB NVMe and a large HDD; Motherboard – Aorus B450 Pro Wi-Fi.
If anyone has suggestions, I’d really appreciate it! Just keep in mind this isn’t related to temperatures—everything is well cooled. The minidump files are clean, and I recently captured some motherboard codes on camera. Hopefully, these insights will help me figure out what’s going on.
When powering on the system, the LEDs will progress through CPU, DRAM, VGA, and then BOOT. The BOOT LED lights up when Windows should start, yet no other lights activate. It seems like a crash might be occurring, causing the PC to loop through boot stages and become stuck at the VGA stage without triggering the BOOT LED. I notice the VGA LED stays on for an unusually long time. Could this indicate a GPU issue? The PSU could also be the problem, but without testing parts it's hard to say. If you have spare components, it would help to examine them.
I eliminated the PSU and GPU from the motherboard list now. There’s no boot loop—system restarts normally. I’ve also noticed that my B1 DIMM slot displays zero RAM in the BIOS, yet it appears in Windows showing 32GB. Running a RAM speed test via Command Prompt revealed inconsistent readings (3600MHz three times instead of four), which is why I relocated the DIMMs to different slots; this confirms it’s not a faulty DIMM since they’re brand new.
It seems the power supply struggled with a sudden load surge and restarted itself. Consider using a higher-quality PSU. Cinebench will only check the CPU, not the GPU. If you run Cinebench with a GPU tester, you might see similar outcomes.
I haven't made any changes... Could this be leading to crashes? The CMOS battery just preserves your BIOS when the computer is off. It never returns to factory settings unless I manually reset it, so I’m not sure that’s the issue. Maybe someone else knows more about this. If it does something different, let me know.