Deitatis

No luck there; hovered my hand around there as well and it was no warmer than anywhere else. Tightened the cooler a touch more; now the issue only happens off & on; bizarrely. No change in temp... so pressure is the fix? At a bit of a loss as to why that would be the deciding factor, or at least why it would have an impact after a year. I would think that rules out PSU at the very least. The cooler is on pretty snug. Fairly certain that memory training is off the table at this point; a get a lot more loops on resetting the CMOS & many memory related Q-codes that only show up in that case. I have some decent thermal paste coming next week & will set the CPU back into the socket to see if that does anything for it.

Sorry, I meant that the battery once set is persisting on boot with the new battery, it reset to 2017 when I replaced it after waiting 15 minutes or so; it isn't a dud was the jist of it. So I've noticed that my CPU temp was spiking on-boot to windows to around 90 degrees judging by a program linked to my case fan controller. I loosened the cooler as a test to see the effect there; and it seemed to make the issue worse. Tightening it further than it was originally reduced the boot looping to an average of 1 from 3. My temps went down to ~50 on boot. Do you think that, pre bios post, the cpu temp could hit the i9s throttle of 100 degrees & that's triggering restarts? I don't get anywhere close to that temperature with the now tightened CPU; neither did I under normal load expect on boot prior to tightening, but I'm not sure what load preparation to post with put on my CPU. The temperatures shown in my bios are in the mid-low 30s. To test the max potential temperature I overclocked my CPU to 5 mHz, turned on XMP & ran cinebench 20 which topped the CPU at, with 100% load, 90 degrees; far under what should trigger a shutoff. As far as I can tell my CPU shouldn't be able to hit this temperature with OC off & the cooler tight. It almost seems like the pressure itself is having an effect on the CPU; but I am not sure what that would mean. The CPU has otherwise been fine for the past year so the mounting to the MB being off strikes me as unlikely, as does bent pins.

I tried to reset defaults by my BIOS's 'restore defaults' options; no affect. I tried the clear CMOS button on my IO plate that ASUS claims is the same as removing the CMOS battery & putting it back it; no affect. I also tried manually removing the CMOS battery & reinserting it as well as trying a new battery entirely; no affect. My clock is not being dropped so the battery seems good. I didn't have XMP on to begin with; enabling it had no affect and neither did manually tweaking the voltages & timings for my RAM. I haven't played with overclocking the CPU; I've not run into anything where the base speed was lacking for my usage. The i9 was more of a room to grow purchase. A bare-bones test I didn't list above was to remove all drives, GPU, all but 1 RAM & all USB devices and try that config 16 times for each RAM and each slot. Still had the boot loop. That was with no XMP & no CPC OC. Really the only change in behaviour pre & post boot loop was that I started leaving my PC on in sleep rather than shutting it off. Probably did that over two months roughly. I shut off my PC each night for probably 5 years and I am recycling that PSU in this PC; but it's rated for 10+ years and I've had no other issues. My motherboard seems fine; the PCIe port for my GPU is a bit shoddy; the latch has gotten jammed a few times, but that is the only issue I've ever run into. The GPU shows up correctly, gets around what is expected in benchmarks & the issue shows GPU in or out. The heatsink for my cooler is pretty big as a Hyper 212 and there isn't really any headway between my fan & my first RAM slot so I thought that the fan may be vibrating the RAM causing issues; but all my RAM shows up in multiple test tools, at the corrrect Mhz (after enabling XMP; it was 2133 prior to that) & I've cycled the RAM so a broken stick / slot doesn't seem to be the issue. Even tried cycling what monitor is attached on boot in case of some weird issues there.

Stumped on this odd issue I ran into about two weeks ago on my home PC. On power cycle the PC fans will start to spin up; my motherboard (An Asus Maximus Hero XI WiFi) predominately show 7F for it's Q-Code (A reserved code so no help there) as it flickers between several and then seemingly shuts back down & repeats this two more times before the BIOS splash screen is displayed. The first attempt to start takes awhile, the second is on & off within a second, the third is also quick and when finally hitting the BIOS Windows takes awhile to launch. This is the standard case; occasionally 1 or 2 loops will do it. I think the record was 7. Nothing has really changed with my PC other than I've been keeping it on more often over the past few months in sleep mode rather than powering it off completely at night. After ~1.5 months of putting the PC to sleep each night I noticed this after shutting it off completely due to wanting to clean out some dust. I moved house March 1st but carried the PC in it's original box with original packaging material with the GPU moved separately. The cooler is air and fairly heavy so I supported it with a non conductive fishing line across the inside of the case. The issue didn't present itself until awhile after moving so it may not be related. I have no PC issues other than this; RAM / drives / GPU are all showing up as expected. I have tried: Cycling my 4x RAM sticks (from 2 2x packs of identical model sticks) across my 4 slots; no affect across the 16 attempts. Removing all hard drives to see if BIOS is posted more quickly; had no affect. Removing my GPU in case of a power draw issue; no affect. Checking my power cables to my motherboard & drives; all seem well in place. Updating my BIOS; updated successfully but no affect. Checking boot order; Windows SSD is top billing & the issue presented with no drives in place. Replacing my MB's CMOS battery (stock Newsun 2032 to a Duracell 2032 rated until 2029) I've tried these in a few combinations; the bare-bones of no GPU, 1 RAM, & no drives also has no affect. My hunch is that it is a PSU or Motherboard issue as my CPU temps hover between 30-70 from passive-load and 4 defective sticks of ram is unlikely to say the least. It also sounds like it could be a RAM training issue; but all my sticks seem to be fine. Anything I can try sort of buying a new PSU / MB & cycling them out? My specs are: CPU: Intel Core i9-9900K Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 RGB Black MB: Asus ROG MAXIMUS XI HERO (WI-FI) Memory: 4x G.Skill Trident Z RGB 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 (I have two of these for 4x8 ) Storage: 2x 4 TB 5400 RPM Western Digital HDD; 1x 3 TB 7200 RPM Seagate Varracuda HDD; 2x 1 TB Samsung 860 Evo GPU: 1x Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 TI 11 GB ROG Strix PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 850 W (This is ~5 years into it's 10 year expected lifespan; a carry-over from my last PC)