Asus Rampage IV Formula starting problems

NecroFlex · July 14, 2021

A friend of mine has issues starting his PC. It's my old PC i had, never had issues with it before, he's now had it for almost 3 years and it stopped powering on properly. At first he could remedy the issue by resetting the CMOS now and then, but now it turns on, shows the asus logo screen, then goes to a black screen, regardless if we pressed DEL/F2 or left it to try to power on and shows B4 on the Qcode display. The only way to get it started is to click the restart button, then it powers on just fine. I've tried reflashing both the BIOSes, i replaced one of the BIOS chips aswell just in case, same issue. CMOS battery is fine, GPU is fine, RAM is fine, tested with memtest86+, i haven't changed the CPU yet to try that, he's got an E5-2680 atm, great CPU for its price, officially supported, not an ES. He has 4x8GB of ram on there, 1600MHz. EVGA GTX 1070, Akasa Voodoo Venom cooler, Fractal Design R2 800W PSU and a few HDDs and SSDs.

Also tried different RAM sticks and a different GPU, same issues. The only time the problem isn't there is if the PC has been unplugged/PSU switched off for a few min, then it powers on fine, but does the same again if it's powered off and tried to power on again. The best explanation i came up with is either a cold boot problem or dying capacitors on either the board or PSU, haven't tried a new PSU yet.

Any other ideas? Anyone had a similar issue?

GalacticRuler · July 14, 2021

This probably shouldn't be your permanent solution, but try changing the boot mode in the BIOS from UEFI to Legacy. I've had four computers that I thought had dead hard drives, but switching the boot mode made them work flawlessly. All these computers are from 2009-2013, which (IIRC) is when the Rampage IV is from. Those computers aren't my daily drivers, so I don't care much about boot times, so you may want to go a little deeper into figuring out the issue, but for now this might let the PC boot properly.

NecroFlex · July 14, 2021

1 minute ago, GalacticRuler said:

This probably shouldn't be your permanent solution, but try changing the boot mode in the BIOS from UEFI to Legacy. I've had four computers that I thought had dead hard drives, but switching the boot mode made them work flawlessly. All these computers are from 2009-2013, which (IIRC) is when the Rampage IV is from. Those computers aren't my daily drivers, so I don't care much about boot times, so you may want to go a little deeper into figuring out the issue, but for now this might let the PC boot properly.

I think he already has legacy boot because i installed the OS for him the last time and the CMOS settings are by default legacy, because i didn't trust UEFI until after x99/4th gen CPUs came out. But will check, thanks for the advice!

Zando_ · July 14, 2021

Tried unplugging the mouse/keeb/any other USB devices and seeing if it boots fine?

https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?60333-New-Build-POST-ERROR-B4

This is with a Maximus VII, but ASUS uses standard codes across their boards. B4 is a USB Hot Plug error, from some other threads looks like it could be a USB controller or CMOS battery fuckup, but removing USB devices is a good first step.

NecroFlex · July 14, 2021

1 minute ago, Zando Bob said:

Tried unplugging the mouse/keeb/any other USB devices and seeing if it boots fine?

https://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?60333-New-Build-POST-ERROR-B4

This is with a Maximus VII, but ASUS uses standard codes across their boards. B4 is a USB Hot Plug error, from some other threads looks like it could be a USB controller or CMOS battery fuckup, but removing USB devices is a good first step.

I'll try that but i think at one point we only had a PS/2 KB plugged in. Will also change the CMOS battery just in case.