I have an ASUS ROG Strix B450-F Gaming motherboard, Trident Z RGB 16GB RAM, a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, and a GeForce RTX 2070 GPU. I built my PC in 2020 and it sat unused for the last couple of years. Recently, I cleaned it out and removed lots of dust, including the CPU cooler. When I took the CPU out, I had to remove the old thermal paste and reapply new paste. Some pins were slightly bent, but I managed to fix them. Now, when I put everything back together, there's an orange light on the motherboard, and it won't POST with both RAM sticks in the A2 and B2 slots. However, it does work with just one stick. Once I get into Windows, it's incredibly slow, to the point where Task Manager crashes. This slowness was also an issue before I stopped using the PC. I can see both my HDD and SSD in the BIOS while booting from the SSD. I'm wondering if I need a new CPU or if there's something else I should check. I've tried various troubleshooting steps like clearing the CMOS battery, reseating the RAM and GPU, but nothing seems to help. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
1 Answer
You might want to check your SSD first. Since you mentioned that the slowness was already a problem before you put the system in storage, there could be a chance your boot drive is faulty. Do you have another SSD you could test?
I only have an external SSD. I'm considering a fresh install of Windows because the slowness is so bad I can barely boot without it freezing. The SSD shows up in BIOS, and I didn't touch it when cleaning, so I'm hoping it's okay.