Motherboard Is Apparently Dead and Unable to POST - Should I Try To Fix It Or Just Go Ahead And Replace The Entire Kit?

JojoBetson · March 11

Please read the entire post.

About a year ago I've built a system with the following parts:

- Intel Core i5-11400 CPU;

- MSI B560M-A PRO mobo;

- 24GB Crucial 2400MHz RAM, later maxed out to 64GB DDR4 2666MHz Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM (this is important);

- 500GB Kingston Fury Renegade M.2 PCIe Gen4x4 SSD;

- AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT 8GB GDDR6 Graphics Card;

- Corsair CS850M 850W Semi-Modular 850W 80 Plus Gold PSU (reused from my previous setup).

Since the beginning I have noticed the motherboard behaved strangely, even when brand new, during the first few days of use, it would plain refuse to POST...

This would fix itself with reseating everything...

If I enabled the ERP ready power feature in the UEFI, the computer would take 3 to 5 seconds to power on after I pressed the power button, sometimes it would take longer.

So I never enabled that option again.

But the weirdest behavior started after I swapped the 24GB RAM for the Vengeance LPX 64GB kit.

At first the motherboard only recognized one stick, had to switch them around to get the 64GB accessible.

Everything then was fine, even the XMP profile got enabled automatically.

But I noticed the mobo would take longer than usual to POST with the new RAM.

Nothing major happened until last month... when I shut the display down and went to do something else...later I came back, GPU fans were on full blast and there was no video output to the monitor. I hard restarted the PC... the motherboard for some reason reset the RAM frequency from the rated 2666MHz to just 2133MHz.

I then tried enabling XMP again twice, on both attempts the mobo reset the speed back to 2133MHz and gave me a textual warning that the RAM overclock was not stable. (This was, in fact , the first sign something was seriously wrong).

But by the 3rd time it worked fine.

I also noticed that sometimes on Linux, after a reboot, there would be no display output. Pressing Ctrl Alt Del always fixed it.

There were no new major problems or crashes until the night of March 8.

After running absolutely fine for the entirety of the day, while I was watching a YT video, the browser tab with the video literally crashed.

"Gah. Your tab just crashed." -- At this point, the machine was minutes away from going to PC Heaven -- I didn't know that, and just shrugged the error away as a bug. Though I was still a bit worried because this was my first time seeing that message.

5 minutes later... the entire OS froze, a very loud static noise was heard on the speakers, and the audio from the video started repeating over and over like a broken record.

The PC was completely unresponsive, I force restarted it as usual... but this time, it no longer came back. No POST, no USB, no nothing.

The mobo will now get stuck on a boot loop alternating for 3 times between the red CPU debug LED and the orange DRAM one.

Until it gives up trying to start and stops with the solid orange DRAM LED.

My effectively brand new general use and workstation PC is now dead after a little more than 1 year.

Is it financially viable to try and fix it or I might as well use the opportunity to upgrade to a newer platform (AM5 or LGA 1700 with DDR5) and also a brand spanking new higher quality PSU?

I might even consider jumping to a prebuilt system like the Dell XPS 8960 or the Precision 3660 as I love Dell's reliability and quality.

Beerzerker · March 11

Could be a new board may do it but I'd also be suspicious of the PSU, it can affect things either causing or contributing to issues like this.

I noted you said the PSU was used in a previous build but I don't know for how long, it's age could be a tell-tale sign of what to do here. It has the wattage needed to run the system you have now, that much is certain with the parts/specs it has and one of a similar wattage rating should be fine.

Going for an upgraded setup isn't a bad way to go but compare costs for doing it vs fixing what you have and see if the risk of fixing what you have is worth the risk of it NOT getting things working again.

In any case, if the current build by it's specs is enough for you I'd look into a board and PSU and compare the cost to doing a new build but as I've already mentioned, what you do may or may not fix it so weigh the cost of a fix vs risk of failure here.

Going pre-built is an option but probrably more expensive too, plus if you like tuning things pre-built's usually don't have as many options to that end.

It's really a matter of budget and what you really want at this point but I'd at least look around at boards and PSU's first.

Others will chime in here with suggestions you can use and go from there with - Those are simply my suggestions about it based on what info was given.
Good luck!