I have a roughly two-year-old PC with an Intel Core i7-12700KF, ASRock B660M Pro RS motherboard, 32 GB of DDR4 memory, Samsung 980 Pro SSD, RTX 4070, and a 750 W power supply. After the computer has been shut down, hibernated, or put to sleep for several hours, pressing the case power button usually does nothing. It takes several short or long presses before the system starts. However, switching the PSU off and back on—or unplugging and reconnecting it—allows the PC to start immediately with one press. This happens consistently regardless of the power state. I have ruled out the case button and front-panel wiring by trying the reset-button header, briefly shorting the motherboard power pins with a screwdriver, and testing another case. I also replaced the original PSU with a Corsair RM750x, but the behavior remained. The system runs Windows 11. What could cause this, and what should I try next?
2 Answers
This sounds like it may be related to Windows 11 hibernation or hybrid sleep, especially Fast Startup. Try disabling Fast Startup in Control Panel under Power Options, and temporarily disable hibernation with `powercfg /h off` from an administrator Command Prompt. Also test with sleep and hibernation disabled to see whether a normal shutdown behaves differently. Updating the motherboard BIOS and loading default BIOS settings would be worthwhile too.
Since changing the case, power-button wiring, motherboard pins, and PSU did not help, the fault is probably somewhere in the motherboard’s standby-power or firmware behavior rather than the physical button. Check the CMOS battery voltage, clear the CMOS, and replace the CR2032 battery if it is weak. Then update the BIOS and retest with default power-management settings. If it still happens after that, the motherboard itself may be failing to properly exit its soft-off state.
That makes sense because the issue happens after every type of low-power state. I’ll test a full shutdown with Fast Startup and hibernation disabled before replacing more hardware.