Help me with diagnosing my MB & CPU

TheThing · June 3, 2019

I'm pretty sure My gaming rig was smited by god and gained the ability to hate me. What seemed like a factory reset became much worse.

My original specs where my issues began:

i7-7700k

Strix Z270E gaming motherboard

16GB DDR4

Evga black 2080ti

Corsair cx750 PSU

I blew out the dust after a move and found an external 1tb HDD that I havent used in a long time. I thought I might try and use it.

Windows decides its a good time to apply a hotfix on my first boot.

Circle animation fails and it just sits there.

I turn it off and try again but it wont get into windows. I take it to a local computer repair shop. Cant boot any windows media usb.

Says its a motherboard issue amd the rest of the componets are fine.

Okay so I buy a brand new Asus Z270-WS motherboard and it wont boot. No bios even. Giving post code 09. That refers to "PCH initialization after microcode loading" No idea. Took out the GPU and bought a new evga 850 PSU, didnt help.

So I take it back to the shop and he flashes the bios and is still getting that code and no bios. Says it could be the brand new motherboard or the cpu. Clearing the CMOS didnt help. Okay so I take it to my buddys place and we do some testing. My ram works in his rig so its known good. My cpu doesn't boot in his board but his is a Z170 and would need a bios update to support my 7700k (we think). We didnt do that for the safety of his rig. We take his known good 6700k and put it in the brand new Z270-WS where it gives a post code of A2 "IDE detect" instead of 09 like before.

We then put his 6700k in the old Z270E board where it fails to boot up as well. Then we put his rig back together and it works just fine. Thank the lord.

This testing was done with and without clean drives installed. I have no clue if its my cpu or my new motherboard or both.

I still need to find out whats actually broken.

Please end my suffering.