Has your motherboard failed?
Has your motherboard failed?
Hey everyone, yesterday my computer experienced an unexpected shutdown where the graphics card driver seemed to fail and needed a full reset. After turning it off and back on, it briefly came back to life before shutting down again right away. When I tried to restart, the system would flash a quick LED or RGB pattern, then spin up fans and immediately power down once more. It never reaches POST or BIOS. I left the power supply disconnected overnight and tried to restart this morning but got nothing—just that brief flash and silence afterward. There are no error codes or warning lights. It feels like something shorted out instantly or the system is trying to shut itself off to avoid damage.
What I've done so far: Used a multimeter on the PSU—all pins show correct voltages (3.3V, 5V, 12V). Tried booting without the GPU connected and with PCIe disabled; it started and kept running with fans and water loop when the ATX was jump-connected. RAM was reset. No improvement.
Recent changes: About 3-4 months ago I upgraded from a Ryzen 9 3900X to 5950X and swapped the RTX 3080 for a 7900XTX. I ran a clean DDU driver before the change. Since then, I've had occasional crashes where the system freezes, tries to recover, but fails. The display stays stuck, sounds play but don't fix it. Sometimes the GPU is turned off in Device Manager, so I have to enable it manually.
I noticed this happens even with new parts—AMD drivers seem to be problematic. Windows Event logs didn’t show any errors, almost as if the crash went unnoticed. My specs are: Ryzen 9 5950X, Asus Strix X570F board, Radeon 7900XTX, 4x8GB RAM, Seasonic Prime GX1000 PSU, plus a couple of 2TB PCIe NVMe drives.
I’ve looked online, but most reports are from people building PCs from scratch. My system has been assembled and upgraded for about two years with some changes. It hasn’t been moved or bumped, no loose wires found. The PSU looks fine—Seasonic model—and I suspect the motherboard might be the issue.
Any advice or insights would be really helpful.
It could still be the PSU. The measurements might be accurate, but it doesn’t indicate whether power is adequate. I had something similar a few years back with an AX 1600i—everything checked out, but the PC would shut down unexpectedly due to erratic power draw. My setup included an 8700k and a GTX 1080 Ti. Maybe try getting a spare PSU to test it.
It was the C13 cable, haha. Now I need to sell the new motherboard I bought yesterday on eBay.