Anything to worry about?

DarkWater · January 13, 2020

My custom-built PC is over 3 years old now and it has been running great since I built it. However, recently I have noticed an issue and I am wondering if it's a sign of something in my system slowly going bad.

I power up my PC and it powers on, I then go someone else for several minutes and I return to the PC frozen on the Windows 10 login screen (with a background and the clock). It looks fine until you try to interact with the system. No response from either keyboard or mouse. TIme is frozen as well. System is basically dead. I look on my motherboard and see DR-DEBUG CODE "04". I long-press the power button to shut it off. It turns off, but not fully by the looks of things. How do I know this? Well, I leave the LEDs constantly lit on my motherboard when it's powered on. They only switch off when I shut down.

During this issue, I find the board's LEDs are still lit up even when the system shuts off and cuts the signal to the screen. I attempt to boot up the PC whilst in its this state and it fails POST. This time the board shows DR.DEBUG CODE "00". To fix it, I have to go to the back of my PC, switch off the PSU and then back on. It boots fine after that with no problems.

This has happened twice so far in maybe a month or so. It's random and not something that happens often.

Any clues as to what might be happening here? Is it a sign of something beginning to fail? Or is it nothing to be overly concerned about?

CPU is the Intel Core i5 6600K overclocked to 4.5GHz and board is the Asrock Extreme4 Z170.