Random reboots w/o image and VGA led on at the mobo

dgdg · July 30, 2021

its a Asus RX 5700xt, a B450 AORUS M mobo and a R5 3600X. 16gb ddr4, with a 800W thermaltake PSU.

This machine have like 6-8 months of use, the problem started today. It reboots while in the desktop, and after that the video doesnt comes up but the pc boots (kb leds answering). The mobo have 4 leds on it, with the following description: VGA, CPU, BOOT, VRAM. The VGA one stays on after the reboot. When I power the pc off and power it back on, everything starts working fine. After a few minutes with the pc on, it happens again: random reboot, video off, VGA led on. I have no idea on what it can be, i preferred to ask here before start troubleshooting it myself. I managed to install the HWinfo and check the values, found somethings off but Im no specialist so here's the screen shot.

Once 3600x doesnt have onboard video adapter Im flying blind here. I tested the VGA using a HDMI cable instead the DisplayPort one, the problem persists. I will try change the VGA slot and see if the problem persists, after it I will try another VGA I have over here, and try the RX5700xt somewhere else. I was quite tranquil about it because its under warranty time, but then I remembered that I opened it to do the "washer fix", and probably it voided the warranty . So I have to fix it somehow now . pls halp

ps: for some weirdo reason the print screen is completely f...ed up. I will try to boot my pc again, and reprint it or take a photo with my phone.

I guess the image is fine now. There is some strange values, like the GPU running at 99% of its capacity while idle, and the Windows' task manager showing the vga as idle... By the way, the first time I tried to open the HWinfo it crashed after I selected the "Sensors only" option and clicked OK. It returned some errors about not able to load drivers of sensors, something about that. I tried to load the program again, w/o checking the sensor's box and it started fine, then I clicked the "sensors" button, in the program, and the sensors loaded up w/o crashing the program.

dgdg · August 6, 2021

I found the origin of the problem: it was a mining virus; "Gpu_update.exe". It uses your GPU when idle or with low use. The thing is: the windows task manager doesn't shows its workload in the "3d" graph under the "GPU" tab, it shows it in the "Compute X" graph, that isn't exhibited by default. That's why the HWinfo and later the Afterburner and AMD software were showing the GPU under heavy load and huge temps and I couldn't see anything in WTM, it was not a problem with the sensors of the GPU. Probably the random pc reboots were related with overheating. It took me some time to find out because the virus probably halts when it sees the GPU is being requested by something else. Once I only played a very undemanding game the last few days, and it were stuttering out of nowhere for no reason, all the time, I got mad and started further investigation. After I suspected that it could be such kind of virus (never heard of this kind of virus before, jezz...) I simply took the Ethernet cable off and waited: the GPU loads went to zero after a few seconds.