I've been experiencing some frustrating issues with my PC since January. Here's the situation: When I leave my PC on overnight or while I'm at work, I come back to find a black screen with the fans lightly spinning but my monitors in sleep mode. The power button turns the PC off instantly—no long press needed. Notably, the VGA and CPU debug lights on the motherboard flicker back and forth. To get it to boot up again, I have to turn off the PSU for about 45 seconds and press the power button to drain everything.
Also, if I shut down the PC completely, sometimes it won't POST when I try to start it up again unless I follow the same PSU reset procedure. However, if I'm gaming, everything seems to run just fine without any of these issues.
Here's my setup:
- SuperFlower Leadex Platinum SE 1200W PSU (2 years old)
- MSI B450 Tomahawk Max Motherboard (5 years old)
- AMD Ryzen 5800x3D CPU (3 years old)
- 32GB RAM (G.Skill Ripjaws, various ages)
- AMD 6900XT GPU (3 years old)
- 280mm AIO cooler (2 years old)
- Multiple drives of varying ages (from 6 years old down to 5 years)
I've run a ton of stress tests (Furmark, Prime 95, etc.) with no crashes or issues found, and I've made sure there are no corrupt files on the system. I haven't done any overclocking recently, and I used to have a stable beta BIOS until these problems started. Looking for insight on whether this is a hardware issue or something else entirely!
1 Answer
It sounds like you might be dealing with a motherboard issue. Try booting into the BIOS and leave it there for a while. If you still see the black screen, it’s likely a hardware problem. Alternatively, you could boot from a disk like an Ubuntu installer to see if the issue persists there—if it does, it's definitely hardware related. Let us know what you find out!
I'll give that a shot tonight! It occasionally manages to last through the night, but it’s been happening more often. I ran the SFC scan again and found two corrupt files that were fixed, but I’m not sure if they’re related.