Computer Restarts at Random

[Noob Slayer]

This is a bit of a story so buckle up! I put 9 Lian-Li fans in my 2 year old PC in September of last year. Every since then, my PC has randomly shut off about once every 2 weeks. No warning that it will shut off, and I can't turn it back on unless I shut the power supply off and turn it back on. Then it boots back up like nothing happened. I didn't really look into it super hard or try to fix it because I was afraid of what I would find if I did. So I dealt with this for 4 or so months. Then this past week it restarted instead of straight shut down which was pretty weird to me. I did a backup (thank god) and then went on with my day. Then 2 days later, shit got real. It was barely making it into windows and then it would restart. I troubleshot the PC for about 4 hours and came to a couple of conclusions. First, RAM was not the issue. I swapped it with other sticks and the same problem happened. Second, It was only resetting in windows. I could get into the BIOS and stay there for as long as I would like but as soon as I tried to get into windows it restarts. I then came to the conclusion that I had a botched Windows install. I tried to reinstall but it restarted in the middle of the reinstall. Then I replaced the power supply and it worked enough for me to get windows reinstalled but after that it restarted. My friend lent me a motherboard, CPU, and RAM that he had kicking around so I could test my GPU and storage to see if they were the problem and it looks like they aren't. Which do you guys think it is more likely to be, motherboard or CPU?

 

TL;DR PC is restarting randomly in Windows, and I know it isn't the fault of the PSU, GPU, SSD, Windows install, or the RAM. It could be the CPU or the motherboard. Which do you think?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Motherboard - Asus X570 Prime Pro

CPU - Ryzen R9 3900X

RAM - 4x8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB 3600MHz

GPU - MSI Gaming X Trio RTX 2080Ti

PSU - Corsair RM850X

Storage - Corsair MP600 Pro 2TB

[connorkincaid]

1 hour ago, Noob Slayer said:

This is a bit of a story so buckle up! I put 9 Lian-Li fans in my 2 year old PC in September of last year. Every since then, my PC has randomly shut off about once every 2 weeks. No warning that it will shut off, and I can't turn it back on unless I shut the power supply off and turn it back on. Then it boots back up like nothing happened. I didn't really look into it super hard or try to fix it because I was afraid of what I would find if I did. So I dealt with this for 4 or so months. Then this past week it restarted instead of straight shut down which was pretty weird to me. I did a backup (thank god) and then went on with my day. Then 2 days later, shit got real. It was barely making it into windows and then it would restart. I troubleshot the PC for about 4 hours and came to a couple of conclusions. First, RAM was not the issue. I swapped it with other sticks and the same problem happened. Second, It was only resetting in windows. I could get into the BIOS and stay there for as long as I would like but as soon as I tried to get into windows it restarts. I then came to the conclusion that I had a botched Windows install. I tried to reinstall but it restarted in the middle of the reinstall. Then I replaced the power supply and it worked enough for me to get windows reinstalled but after that it restarted. My friend lent me a motherboard, CPU, and RAM that he had kicking around so I could test my GPU and storage to see if they were the problem and it looks like they aren't. Which do you guys think it is more likely to be, motherboard or CPU?

 

TL;DR PC is restarting randomly in Windows, and I know it isn't the fault of the PSU, GPU, SSD, Windows install, or the RAM. It could be the CPU or the motherboard. Which do you think?

 

Thanks in advance!

Please post a parts list of what you have!

[Noob Slayer]

3 minutes ago, connorkincaid said:

Please post a parts list of what you have!

Whoops, I added them to the post

[RTX 3071]

1 hour ago, Noob Slayer said:

This is a bit of a story so buckle up! I put 9 Lian-Li fans in my 2 year old PC in September of last year. Every since then, my PC has randomly shut off about once every 2 weeks. No warning that it will shut off, and I can't turn it back on unless I shut the power supply off and turn it back on. Then it boots back up like nothing happened. I didn't really look into it super hard or try to fix it because I was afraid of what I would find if I did. So I dealt with this for 4 or so months. Then this past week it restarted instead of straight shut down which was pretty weird to me. I did a backup (thank god) and then went on with my day. Then 2 days later, shit got real. It was barely making it into windows and then it would restart. I troubleshot the PC for about 4 hours and came to a couple of conclusions. First, RAM was not the issue. I swapped it with other sticks and the same problem happened. Second, It was only resetting in windows. I could get into the BIOS and stay there for as long as I would like but as soon as I tried to get into windows it restarts. I then came to the conclusion that I had a botched Windows install. I tried to reinstall but it restarted in the middle of the reinstall. Then I replaced the power supply and it worked enough for me to get windows reinstalled but after that it restarted. My friend lent me a motherboard, CPU, and RAM that he had kicking around so I could test my GPU and storage to see if they were the problem and it looks like they aren't. Which do you guys think it is more likely to be, motherboard or CPU?

 

TL;DR PC is restarting randomly in Windows, and I know it isn't the fault of the PSU, GPU, SSD, Windows install, or the RAM. It could be the CPU or the motherboard. Which do you think?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Motherboard - Asus X570 Prime Pro

CPU - Ryzen R9 3900X

RAM - 4x8GB Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB 3600MHz

GPU - RTX 2080Ti

PSU - Corsair RM850X

Storage - Corsair MP600 Pro 2TB

These Lian Li fans are a bit suspicious right now.

Check this post out, I've seen another issue with these Lian Li fans.

[Noob Slayer]

4 minutes ago, RTX 3071 said:

These Lian Li fans are a bit suspicious right now.

Check this post out, I've seen another issue with these Lian Li fans.

Oh dang, I'll try it without the controller plugged in to see if it makes a difference. Thanks!

[warelius]

On 1/13/2022 at 5:45 PM, Noob Slayer said:

Oh dang, I'll try it without the controller plugged in to see if it makes a difference. Thanks!

Did you get any progress?

[Noob Slayer]

Ok, sorry it has been so long but I have been in troubleshooting hell so let me tell you the full story just so you know the troubleshooting I went through.

 

So I first unplugged the sata power to the RGB controller but that didn't change anything. I then replaced the motherboard and it was still boot looping so I bought a new CPU and it STILL boot looped. I have now replaced everything but it still wasn't working. I then unplugged the USB header for the Lian Li RGB controller and everything worked perfectly. For 2 weeks the system remained on and never turned off or rebooted (this is with the new CPU and motherboard). I thought, "Great, now I can return the CPU and motherboard and just leave the RGB controller unplugged." So I put back my original motherboard and CPU returned the new stuff and low and behold the thing starts rebooting again. Weird. I then went back to microcenter and got just the CPU back (since it was easier to install) and put it back in my system. And again it boot looped but after it boot looped once it was perfectly fine. Since then it has been perfectly fine.

 

What happened? My theory is that when I initially tried the new CPU, the previous reboot had happened when windows was booting which causes windows to go into recovery mode. However, it can only get into recovery mode after it tries to load windows again, recognizes that there was an error loading windows, and then reboots to load the recovery mode. So the reboot that I saw both times that I installed the new CPU was just Windows rebooting into the recovery mode. 

 

TL;DR It was the CPU

 

I am going to run it for a week and after that, plug the RGB controller back in to see if it for some reason was both things in tandem. Not sure why the CPU failed as temps were never higher than like 85 and it was never sustained at that temp. I noticed that there could have been uneven pressure on the water block that was on it (There were some indents on one of the corners from the IHS), so that could possibly have been it. Either way I now have a 5800X which won't let me down when it comes to gaming, but it still kinda sucks that I lost those extra cores and threads. Gonna talk to AMD support about it to see if they can do anything. I'll update again if there is anything to report.