My six-month-old PC stopped booting properly after a Windows update. The monitor shows no signal, the keyboard does not light up or respond, and I cannot even enter the BIOS. The motherboard's DRAM warning light stays on, while the CPU, VGA, and BOOT lights remain off.
I have already powered the system down, unplugged it, held the power button for about 10 seconds, and started it again, but nothing changed. The system has a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an ASUS TUF GAMING B850-PLUS WIFI motherboard, 64GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5 memory in two 32GB sticks, an RTX 5090, and a 4TB NVMe SSD.
What should I try next, and could this be DDR5 memory training rather than a problem caused directly by the update?
1 Answer
A DRAM light usually points to the motherboard having trouble initializing the memory. DDR5 systems can sometimes retrain the RAM after a restart, and the screen may stay blank while that happens. Leave the computer powered on for up to 15 minutes before interrupting it.
If it still does not POST, clear the CMOS to restore the motherboard’s default settings. Then remove one RAM stick and install the remaining stick in the single-module slot recommended by the motherboard manual. Try booting again and give it plenty of time; if it fails, test the other stick by itself.
I left it running for roughly 10 minutes, since I understood “several minutes” to mean around that long. I’m not familiar with clearing the CMOS, so I’ll need to check the motherboard manual for the correct procedure.