hey all, iv run into a problem! this morning i woke my system up from sleep. it ran for an hour and then it just shut off. no "windows is restart" or anything, it just shut off.
i powered it back on and it turned on, back into windows. it ran for a while and then i noticed my ethernet cable was "disconnected". it wasnt. i rebooted, internet came back up, and i continued on for about 45 min. at that time, the system locked up. i pressed the 'reset' button on the front of the case, but nothing happened. i pressed the power button for a second and then it restarted... not sure if that triggered it or the restart was just delayed for some reason.
at that point it went into a bit of a boot loop. this is not unusual for this board as its always given me weird rebooting issues. fortunately, the ROG panel that i have plugged in lets me know kinda whats going on and iv learned to know what to look for as to when i will need to do a more aggressive restart. i held the power button to turn the system off. when it was, i held the CMOS reset button at the back for 15 seconds. i powered back on, got the standard 'bios failed to load settings, press f1 to setup' message that i usually get when i have restart errors as i run an OC'd setup. went back into bios, loaded my OC profile, but then went into Xtreme Tweaker to at least put the cpu back to stock. saved and exited, and then it got interesting...
it did about 3 very quick boot/restart sequences, about 2 every seconds. this seemed bad and i didnt know how to stop it, so i flicked off the power into the PSU between loops. i then held the CMOS clear button again, as this has always been my only defense against times when it wont boot, as it puts everything back to normal. i powered back up and watched the ROG panel. the first thing it always does is check the ram, and displays the message DDR. the next step is CPU and it displays CPU. normally it would then continue on the display USB, then VGA, then BOOT OK, and finally R5E. it never made it past CPU. as soon as the panel showed me CPU, the system shuts down.
i tried some basic troubleshooting... removing ram, swapping dimms, unplugging video cards, making sure other cables were properly connected. i keep getting the same result... power off after it says CPU.
i always thought the CPU check was the very first part of POST, but maybe not. this would SEEM to indicate the CPU is dead if its not passing this part of POST, according to the ROG panel. if i didnt have the panel, i would probably have no way of knowing this is where it was stopping.
with only 1 DIMM of ram installed, i tried switching to 2nd bios, CMOS reset, power up (every time i power up im using the SAFE start button on the board, not the power button at the front of the case), and this attempt i got error code 79 - CSM Initialization, and it just stayed there. The ROG panel was stuck on 'CPU Init'. Tried a few more swaps between bios 1 and 2, CMOS resetting, but nothing gets it too boot passed CPU on the ROG panel. The few times i watched the debug LED, it just quickly went to 00 and then turned off. according to the manual, 00 means nothing.
as a side note, as i said above, the system is OC'd. the CPU is an older i7 5960x which iv OC'd to 4.4ghz. Its about 5 years old, and its a work station CPU, so its seem its share of use, but id say the majority of its life has been pretty easy. in other words, its not like it spends hours every day running full out. however last week i needed to chew through alot of heavy CPU tasks, and ironically i even thought to myself 'i wonder how long this cpu will last'.
anyway, thats where im at. i have no other compatible CPU to test with. the only way to confirm its the CPU would be to buy another one. i was toying with the idea of building a new system last year, but i dont think things have improved enough to warrant a new build. however, given that im looking at the possibility of having to buy a new CPU now anyway, maybe now is the time.
either way, im hoping someone here to maybe offer some yays or nays to the possibility that the CPU is dead, and its not just somehow a bios problem, or something else completely. any general words of wisdom here would help as im pretty bummed right now, and given the state of the world, i cant even go out to the store to get a replacement anything. it would need to be ordered online and would take days to get here.
thanks