So Lightning Struck My House And Fried My Pc.. Kinda

[spudkin]

So about 4 or 5 days ago lightning magically struck my house and absolutely fucked with my computer. After relentless troubleshooting i still haven’t found a direct issue, i’ll walk you through the absolutely obnoxious problem that i’ve been dealing with in hopes somebody knows what’s wrong

So, right after lightning hit my house i heard to explosions and im pretty sure one came from my computer, so i immediately ran to it and unplugged the power supply. Then after things calmed down i attempted turn it on. And this is where things get odd. The computer turned on, everything all fans were spinning ram rgbs were on and everything, but when the computer turned on what showed up on screen was.. nothing it was on and the monitor was detecting that there was an image being transmitted to it but all i could see was a gray endless screen. So immediately i thought ok, i’m going to restart my computer go into bios and try to troubleshoot. But i couldn’t get into bios it was just stuck on a gray screen it wouldn’t even pop up the gigabyte screen which is my motherboard brand and i was like what the fuck. at this moment the only thing i thought was wrong was the gpu because when something like this happens and no image is popping up on the screen then your automatic thought should be that it’s the gpu. but i really didn’t want it to be so instead i just kept on restarting the computer over and over just to see some kind of difference, hoping to god that the computer would magically turn on. just until it did. the computer booted into bios and what did i do, nothing i looked through everything and it looked like it was reading everything, the cpu, the ram, everything. But the bios was absolutely awful quality and more than i’d ever seen. normally it would be really bad quality but you could atleast read the letters. after the strike i could barely. so this led me to believe it actually was the gpu, but i was still skeptical because how could’ve it booted into bios if neither my motherboard or my cpu has integrated graphics, didn’t make much sense. 

Also, me and my friend got a hard drive and downloaded windows media onto it and plugged it in and unplugged the ssd and it actually went into the windows installer, we got all the way to the repairing windows screen and it never ended up working and we turned off the computer while it was a supposedly repairing windows which now that i think about it was probably dumb as fuck

So what i decided to do was to call up my friend and ask him if i could test my gpu in his computer to see if it was that. and so we tried but he has an awful alienware prebuilt that doesn’t allow any gpu above 2 fans to fit in it at all so that was a no go. but he told me that there could be a different issue with the computer entirely, the ssd. he said that the reason that nothing was showing up and it was a gray screen was maybe because my ssd had been fried and the boot files were corrupted. 

so what i thought to do was to unplug my ssd and to plug in a thumb drive with nothing but windows on it. but now it seemed like things were getting worse. the computer stopped going into that gray screen and the monitor began to not even recognize picture going to the screen. so i sat there for about an hour turning off and back on the computer over and over and over with inconsistent results. i got into bios twice after probably 40 times of restarting my computer. which really got me thinking what’s the actual thing that’s wrong here. i thought that maybe it was the cpu, but just in my luck the new cpu i had bought a week prior had just come in so if it was the cpu then i would be able to put in the new one and test it and see if the computer would actually turn on. 

But with the new cpu we had even different results. I put it in and the computer would still turn on and get power, but nothing would show up on the screen.. nothing and even weirder now my keyboard and mouse wouldn’t have any power and it wouldn’t let me hold down the power button anymore to fully reset the computer so that i could turn it on again. So my immediate thought was to try  my old cpu again and see what happens. and funny enough i put the old cpu in and it immediately shows the gigabyte screen right when i turned my computer on, and it said something like scanning new devices or something along those lines. but went right back into that old endless gray screen i would get from the start. so i thought i’ll just restart it because i had never seen it say that before. so i did and it went to the grey screen, then again i restarted, then again, and then it just stopped showing the grey screen similar to before. so i put the new cpu in again to see any difference and there wasn’t. so i thought fuck it has to be the motherboard or the gpu. so i’ve bought the same motherboard and it’s currently on its way. 

If you guys have any idea what this possibly could be or what possibly could’ve been fried with my computer please tell me. because if the motherboard doesn’t seem to fix the issue i’ll have to buy a new gpu and i can’t really afford that right now also because the fact that my gpu that may be fried i had just got literally a week before the lightning had struck my house and i had bought that new cpu because my old one had been bottlenecking my new one. Thank you.

My Specs
-(old cpu) Ryzen 5 2600 (New cpu) Ryzen 5 5600x
-rtx 3060 
-2x8 corsair vengeance pro
-Gigabyte b450m ds3h
-evga gq 650w power supply
-kingston ssd

[Spotty]

If it's a problem with the display have you tried a different monitor? Your monitor will have its own power supply and if there was a power surge it might have fried the monitor. Also swap the display cable. If you don't have a spare monitor to test with use your TV, it'll have a HDMI input.

 

It's not going to be the SSD if it's not showing the BIOS, the BIOS loads before it loads the OS from the SSD. Even if the SSD was dead you'd still be able to access the BIOS.

[Isuck Assimov]

that "explosion" might have been some capactiors releasing pressure / breaking.
See whether you can find any caps that have bulged tops, might also be in your displays control board or power supply.

[Pixelfie]

Does the motherboard have an LED showing what's wrong? Most modern boards have these. If it does not I would cancel the order for the new board and choose a board which does have one, and also one with BIOS flashback.

 

Also for the 5600X the motherboard might need a BIOS update which could be why it's not working, though I'd say the old CPU is probably fine.

 

Also look if you can see physical damage on any components, for example a capacitor like said above.

 

Might also be the PSU which had an explosion. I've seen cases where it works fine after, but if the PSU was exploding I would still replace it even if it works fine. Might be worth letting someone check it for you, don't do this yourself since disassembling the PSU is dangerous.

[Beerzerker]

3 hours ago, Assimov said:

that "explosion" might have been some capactiors releasing pressure / breaking.
See whether you can find any caps that have bulged tops, might also be in your displays control board or power supply.

The idea you have in mind is sound and does illustrate what you are getting at but it's too new to have caps like that, the board has solid caps instead as shown in this pic directly from Gigabyte.

The same basics do apply, if one or more looks deformed then it's bad and in need of replacement.

To address the issue with the new chip doing nothing and the old one seeming to at least work to an extent, even if the system had not been popped you may have needed a BIOS update for the new chip to work with that board, if it has a BIOS that doesn't support the new chip it's not going to work period.
However since the old chip is doing something, you can try a standard clearing of the BIOS with the old chip first and see if anything changes.
I say that because the BIOS may have gotten a bit scrambled/corrupted and reflashing it may fix things, provided the BIOS chip itself isn't bad/damaged.

How to clear it is simple:
Unplug the machine from the wall to remove it's external power source.
Then press the power button a few times to discharge the PSU.
Next, remove the battery.
Then move the CMOS jumper from it's "Hold" to "Clear" position, know that some times it may help a board that's stubborn about clearing it's BIOS.
Let the machine sit like that for at least 10 minutes, then do the exact reverse of the above steps to set up for use again, making sure you remember to set the jumper back where it was and to restore power from the wall as the very last step done.
Try it and know everything will have to be reset including the system clock once done because when cleared, it resets everything to system defaults.

If that fails to work then you can try this:
See if you can't get the board's BIOS updated as the first thing to do here.
Alot, if not all boards today don't require a CPU to be in it to do a BIOS update, check your manual or simply visit Gigabyte's site and get the details on how to update the BIOS for your board and follow the directions.
If a chip is required to be in it, AND the current BIOS version does NOT support the new chip you'll have to use the old one or one that's compable with all BIOS versions to do it with.
If you can flash it, let it do the flash and then try the new chip.

If it works fine then you know the old one got zapped but understand, the nature of things getting popped by a lightning strike may have caused other problems yet to be known, most likely you have more than just a bad CPU in play here.
Only real way to know is if it works after you do the above and it works, you'd have to use it and see if anything else happens.

Maybe this will help, maybe not but worth a shot at this point.