PC Posts with no Graphical Output

[WishDoctor]

Hey guys. Today I tried overclocking my graphics card using MSI afterburner, and I put the memory slider up higher than I should have and my PC crashed. Without thinking to hard about it (since my msi afterburner is not set to open on startup) I decided to go into my bios and turn on virtualization since it was something I was planning on turning on next time I booted my computer anyways. While being in my bios I noticed that my graphics card was only running in pcie 8x instead of the 16x. So when my pc rebooted normally I went to download gpu-z to see if my bios was lying or not. I read online that sometimes graphics cards will only use 8x when its in low power mode and it should go up to 16x under load, so I used the integrated GPU burner, after about 2 minutes of running that my computer crashed and the next boot took closer to 5 minutes (which is long compared to the normal 30 seconds it takes) which was weird and it was only showing my second monitor, silo I immediately assumed that I somehow screwed up my graphics drivers and went directly to nvidias website and downloaded the newest driver (released nov 17th 2020) and it downloaded fine except when it finished downloading there still wasn't an output to my main monitor, so I tried unplugging the display port cable for my second monitor from my computer in an attempt to force my main monitor to be outputted to. Except that didn't work and after swapping around cables plugging into different display ports on my graphics card, I plugged the cables back into their original ports and I now had no output to either of my monitors(all the display port swapping happened while the computer was on) so I pressed the power button once to let it shut down on its own, and I tried booting back up afterwards and didn't get any graphics output. After that my computer would only post (I know it was posting because I only had to press the power button briefly for it to shut down) 

 

I have also tried reseating the graphics card, I tried a different graphics card all together, I tried a different PCIE slot with both my main GPU and the other known working GPU. I reseated the ram for good measures, I reset my cmos by removing the battery for roughly 30 seconds without power, I've drained the power normally by unplugging the power supply and holding the power button, and now I'm sitting here with all my hard drives and m.2 unplugged from the system and I'm clueless.

 

Usually I'm pretty good with computers and this is my first time having to write up my own cry for help.

 

Oh and specs:

 

B450 asus strix motherboard

Gtx 1660 super (other know good gpu is an r9 270x)

16GB GDDR4 2333Mhz

Ryzen 3 3100

550watt silentpro gold power supply(cooler master)

M.2 250gb sn750 NVMe wdBlack

1 terabyte hdd

500gb hdd 

250gb hdd 

 

 

Side note; I was trying to get into crypto mining just so I could understand how it worked and I only started yesterday and I mined yesterday from 1pm to 9am the next day and then I stopped to try a different crypto currency.

 

If there is anything else I can clear up please just ask, I'm pretty good at understanding most PC terms.

[cr8tor]

So it sounds like this is a no post situation?

You have tried multiple GPU's, reseated things and cleared cmos. 

While you had the battery out and it was unplugged, did you press and hold the power button for 5 seconds?

If not, there could still be enough power in the capacitors for it to have not reset.

 

If all that was done, and your getting nothing on the screen, i would say try it with no memory, see if the situation changes.

It could be the CPU or the mobo at this point from what im getting out of things.

[WishDoctor]

6 minutes ago, cr8tor said:

So it sounds like this is a no post situation?

You have tried multiple GPU's, reseated things and cleared cmos. 

While you had the battery out and it was unplugged, did you press and hold the power button for 5 seconds?

If not, there could still be enough power in the capacitors for it to have not reset.

 

If all that was done, and your getting nothing on the screen, i would say try it with no memory, see if the situation changes.

It could be the CPU or the mobo at this point from what im getting out of things.

I did hold the power button when the cmos was out. I just tried to power on my system with a low power gtx 745 and used a dvi cable and I did get into my bios. Could this be a power supply issue since both the graphics cards I initially tried require extra pcie power?

[cr8tor]

5 minutes ago, WishDoctor said:

Could this be a power supply issue since both the graphics cards I initially tried require extra pcie power?

Yeah, that's a possibility also.

[WishDoctor]

Just an update I tried using a known working power supply with all the original hardware and I got a post with just having the 8pin for the cpu the 12 pin for the mobo and the 8 pin for my gpu. But once I plugged in my hard drives and all my peripherals I stopped getting an image after reboot. I'm going to get another power supply at some point, is there anything else I should try in the meantime?

[cr8tor]

19 hours ago, WishDoctor said:

But once I plugged in my hard drives and all my peripherals I stopped getting an image after reboot

It is possible that a drive or peripheral is causing this also. Try them one at a time, see if you can narrow it down to a device causing this.

I once had a floppy drive cable that when it was plugged into the mobo would cause a no post, even if there was nothing plugged into the other end.

It just started causing this one day. Worked fine before. That one took forever to figure out since the cable looked perfect. 

[WishDoctor]

On 11/19/2020 at 11:53 AM, cr8tor said:

It is possible that a drive or peripheral is causing this also. Try them one at a time, see if you can narrow it down to a device causing this.

I once had a floppy drive cable that when it was plugged into the mobo would cause a no post, even if there was nothing plugged into the other end.

It just started causing this one day. Worked fine before. That one took forever to figure out since the cable looked perfect. 

I tried what you suggested but it didn't help with anything,  though that is something I will keep jn mind for future troubleshooting as it never occurred to me. I'm going to write a separate comment for what I've so far encountered.

[WishDoctor]

TLDR: I reinstalled windows and everything worked again.

 

After unplugging all the peripherals I decided that I was just going to wait until I could get a power supply. Fast forward to earlier today when I got a brand new 750 watt power supply. I plugged everything in the way it was originally (hoping for this to be done with) I still ended up with no output. I decided to go back to using my gtx 745 since I had an output with that originally. I had thought that maybe the graphics drivers on the motherboard itself were possibly broken, which would make sense why its only accepting cards that use power from the motherboard. So I made a windows media USB and plugged in a hard drive and even though the hard drive didn't show up in my bios it still showed up to windows which is kind of odd. After I installed windows on a new hard drive my 1660s started outputting graphics. I never got to installing the graphics drivers for the mobo so I guess when my computer crashed while I was overclocking windows got corrupted, and somehow still affected my graphics card while the hard drives were unplugged? Or maybe my drivers on my graphics card got corrupt and didn't correct themselves until it saw a new windows machine.