I've been having some issues with my PC lately. For the past few weeks, it was taking longer for the POST screen to appear on boot, and I noticed the fans would sometimes sound like they were restarting. Oddly enough, the time on my clock got reset every time I booted, although the date stayed correct. After some investigation, I found that my BIOS was resetting on each boot. I tried updating the BIOS to version F20, but it didn't help.
So, yesterday, I replaced the CMOS battery, hoping that would solve the issue. Reassembling everything seemed to work fine for about 8 hours, and I saw no problems when I shut down. But when I came home from work today and tried to power it up, nothing happened—no lights, no sounds, absolutely dead.
The only odd noise I noticed was a quiet, continuous clicking sound from the PSU when connected to the 24-pin, which continues even after shutting off the power, stopping only when I unplug the power cable.
Here's what I've tried so far: using a different power cable, trying a different outlet, reconnecting the power button, shorting pins, performing a paperclip test on the PSU, shorting the CMOS pins, and discharging capacitors—all with no success.
Am I to blame the new CMOS battery installation? I had to use a knife to pry off the connectors from the old battery, which I held in place with electrical tape.
My specs are as follows: Gigabyte AORUS B550i PRO AX, Corsair SF600 Platinum PSU, AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, G.Skill 32GB DDR4 RAM, and ADATA SX8200 Pro 2TB SSD.
Next, I plan to get a multimeter to check the PSU. If the PSU checks out, I might just take everything apart again to investigate the CMOS battery installation. But I'm not sure how to diagnose a motherboard issue, or if I need extra tools for that. Anyone have suggestions or thoughts?
3 Answers
You might want to try unplugging everything - I mean literally every peripheral off the system, and then try to power on. I ran into a strange boot issue years ago caused by a USB device interfering. It may seem odd, but give it a shot!
It sounds like a PSU issue; check it first. Your BIOS resetting indicates that the CMOS battery was likely dead for a while, which could also hint at bad power delivery. Anytime weird behavior shows up, I lean towards the PSU as the culprit.
I'd second that; the PSU seems like the best guess here. I've had similar issues and it's usually the power unit acting up.
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