Motherboard or cpu issue?

[Cramig88]

Hi all, here we go again

-amd 5900x

-asus crosshair viii / WiFi (all was done with latest bios installed first - 5702 or something. Late march 2024) / ekwb waterblock made for the board, covers the vrms and cpu (only mounted with 4 screws but not fun to remove)

-4x Corsair vengeance 18@3600, 16gb each (QVL ok)

SIDE NOTE do have 4x 16@3200 16g sticks, nighthawks by teamforce. DOCP didn’t work / non qvl so swapped em out quite a while ago - no problems, just saying I have a spare set

-asus 4090 w custom waterblock

-xfx 6700 xt w custom block

-pci 1x to 16x riser, usb 3.0 (unused ATM but plugged in)

-quadro 4000 rtx

-more radiators than necessary

-all the fans are thermaltake something’s, high end/expensive. No RGB, either 2500/3000 rpm peak 120s and 140s

-thermal take dc5 pump with 500ml res.

-another dc5 pump connected to the drain ports on the top radiator (420mmx60mm) with a seperate 1L res. It’s there for redundancy and to help the primary pump cycle the water, yes that many radiators…. Still have one 140mmx60mm on “standby” waiting to be installed

MORE IMPORTANTLY

-seasonic 1000w bronze blah blah, ONLY powering the motherboard, cpu (aux cpu too) and 4090. Only powering the molex for the TT pump. I mean face it, I’ll use the best brand to power the most crucial stuff

-“gamemax” 1050w bronze powering 8x sata drives, the fan hub, 6700/quadro and molex to pump 2 (“jump started” with lol, one of my many mobo this pin to that pin things) this guys outside the case

-DO have a spare psu, seasonic 1500w PLATINUM, Corsair. Had it in a while ago then did math and figured out at 80% peak efficiency (assuming) I had ~1200w to work with. Say the least when the pc was under 100% load it couldn’t sustain and my system would just shut off. Again doing math, 230w max TDP on cpu, 75w per pci, 8x SSDs, fan hub, toss in the video cards…. Yeah. Should mention it’s an EU version (I guess it’s better than US?  I dono, wasn’t intentional), have a EU to US 120v power cable. It’s gotta be 12/10 gauge per wire, pos/neg/ground. Easy to find in my cache of pc stuff cause duh. It’s super thick

+since I noticed issues with power that’s when I took it out an opted for 2x PSU’s rather than one (thing was large too, had to pull out the aforementioned 140mm radiator to make room)

-thermal take TT71 view full/E-atx case, it’s all been taken apart to a skeleton since I did the psu swap.  Yes I did swap the Corsair power lines for the appropriate PSUs, pain in the butt

-both PSUs are plugged directly into the outlet and each outlets are on seperate breakers (haven’t tripped one… yet)

-2x Samsung 980 1tb nvmes, 2023 manufacture date, made in Korea or Vietnam… forget. HAD 2021 variants which thanks to Samsung failed to release a “notification” to update the firmware immediately or your drives will die. Just saying, anyone reading this, yeah…

-GPU’s are installed top to bottom in order mentioned

(think that’s all, at least what’s relevant?)

 

PROBLEM: Q-code reads 00, can’t do bios flashback via usb cause I noticed they don’t light up on POST. See “what I’ve tried” for more details. 
 

WHAT MAY HAVE HAPPENED: day prior I was fiddling with overclocking the CPU. Using HWinfo for duh, cinebench r23/aida64(prime95?)/nicehash(only cpu was enabled) for monitoring and writing down voltages per core, core “order” preferred. Basicallly I was handwriting cinebench scores (5 min stress multi and single), hashrates etc along with the values as reported by HWinfo, voltages/temps and so on. 
I had NOT been working with the PBO scalar at this point. ALL bios were stock aside from a few minor areas unrelated, SVM and 4g decoding, raid, disabled EDC (whatever for power efficiency/auto downstepping, ERP?)

anyway I had gotten to 46x multiplier in main menu, CCX 0/1 to 46 also. Power settings were set to “extreme”, 120% on cpu, 140 (I think) on DRAM. most settings were either enabled or left to auto. If I recall correctly I eventually just went to auto to eliminate variables

by the time I got to stressing it I wrote down values, my notes are in the office, I noticed at 4600mhz (cores aren’t set to go faster or slower) the mobo wouldn’t supply more than 1.300v per core, 12 total. At this point cinevench would crash and Nicehash would “blow up” the pc (immediate shut down)

so I toned it all down to 43x, ccd0/1 too. Figured I’d be on the safe side doing so, plus I got the best results in my notes. ~20100 on cinebench, .00890 hashrate (again may be inaccurate, notes upstairs)

tpu I and II set to “none”, uh that application preference thing to “none” (It has options for Geekbench, cinebench and 2 others)

BLCLK at 100.00

from there I had her mining all night, after a few hours I enabled the 3 GPUs. Woke up the next day and yep, all was still good and going. ~1.204v avg on all cores

So now I’m like… hmm. Let’s try to increase the voltage one step at a time and keep the everything the same. I have a saved bios profile on a USB of the most stable setup so why not?  I forget what the positive increments were but from none I hit “+” and it… offset, increased?  Idk whatever it did, by like .00264 something. The minimal amount

Saved, restart, windows was stable. Though I did notice the monitor would go blank on login (auto login via registry). The gpu would kick in (after the “dos” spinny image) and I’d see my username which has a profile pic of my dog, blank, dog again pc is thinking, blank, then desktop as usual. Mind you the “blank” was just black screen and basically a quick flicker

i don’t recall checking HwInfo, my assumption was my clock speed was too “low” for the additional voltage. I naturally figured no point in stressing it or checking

restsrt, bumped up one more (now we’re at + twice, so two “minimal” increments) and went to 4600 to compensate. 
I mean, 4600 worked fine aside from crashing due to the 1.3v “lock” I noticed the day before. Hence why I stepped it up a tad one last time

bam, BSOD loop. Whoopsie.

now this part I’m unsure as I don’t remember completely what I did. Back to bios, removed the voltage offset, went down to 43x all over, and I’m pretty sure I adjusted the VRM/delivery from extreme to optimal, put cpu voltage to 120% peak, down’ed the ram to 110%. Basically my mindset was I’m getting too excited and I had best stay in a safe bubble.

save/restart

ahhhhh darn, q-code of 00 and nothing. Literally no POST, waited watching the q-code LED and no change. Fudge!

 

WHAT HAVE I TRIED?

-first logical step, hit the clear CMOS button on the IO panel, the green one. It’s worked in the past just not with a 00 code. No dice

-thought for a second, looked at the manual. Hm, there’s a button on the motherboard for safe boot. Ok. Squeezed my finger in there blind and felt it (the little button isn’t by any others by far) and pushed it. Nope

-flipped off the power, waited maybe ten seconds then unplugged the PSUs. Waited idk ten minutes, reversed the above and hit the glowing start button.  Nothing. Tried safe boot again, nothing

-snap, now I’m in a pickle. Removed power sources as noted above and flipped the switch on the motherboard for SLOW MODE. Yes only switch on the bottom, mentioned in manual, yada yada. Power applied again, still 00. Well… let’s reflash the bios via the button and a usb

-flipped safe boot off, (done this before) and used a laptop (hp 8760w/32g/3x SSDs/m.2 as boot/datacenter 2022) to setup a usb. First used a 128g drive, went to format and duh, ntfs or exFAT. Nah that won’t work, plus it don’t have a blinky light as an IO indicator. Grabbed my BIOS drive with the saved profiles, shoved the same bios I have on it, root directory and renamed to C8HW.cap (whatever it should be). No go. It’s only a 512mb but I do know the pc is finicky about it and spits a Qcode if I load a profile/save/reboot and leave it plugged in. Eh maybe it’s just the stick, no biggie

-busted out my ziplock of flash drives. All varying capacities and brands. One drive was too large (according to manual it says = or less than 2gb) so I just did diskpart and cleaned the volume. Then cleaned the drive. Made a 1g partition at the “start” of the drive and fat32’d it. No dice again

1gb drive, another 512, and a 256mb (haha yep), all done same as above minus the partitioning. Just clean/format fat32 and “whatever”.cap. Nothing

read a thread that said sometimes using windows to unzip a file can corrupt a bios file. Winrar is a better option, ok

Last attempt, 512mb stick I usually use, same process just with winrar. Nothing

Manual says once the button goes blue it’ll blink and stay blue, could take some time but once it isn’t blue anymore it’s done. So pc is still sitting there with the blue light on and stuck in the obvious port labeled for flashback (just being descriptive for sake of a response asking if I used the correct usb port)

so far, nothing

-prior to the last/current usb, swapped cpu power from the seasonic to the “gamemax”. No go. Figure that was a pointless route since just below the power headers has a red light that stays illuminated if, duh, no power (provided the mobo has power). Power delivery is fine

-also removed cpu-opt fan from header. Removed HUB from cpu header and plugged in a spare fan. Still 00

-oh and left the pc with no power for at least 24 hours.  Both PSUs off and unplugged. Nothing - even without the “gamemax” PSU connected

 

CONCLUSION?

00 indicates a cpu issue or a motherboard issue. Taking a wild guess tinkering with the bios, trying to reflash it entirely messed it up. Without a UART flasher I can’t do it manually

also I might have messed the cpu up. Not sure if it’s plausible cause a MOBO of this… nature has failsafes built in to prevent “blowing it up”. I’ve had similar issues in the past and instead of panicking I just let it sit without power, then all would be fine

as mentioned the usb sticks never blink even without hitting the reflash button. So if the mobo don’t detect a cpu, it stops any POST attempts thereafter. Hence, no usb activity. Sure my crap via usb gets power, gaming mat and junk. Otherwise nothing

 

i dont have a spare cpu laying around to try out.  Kinda wish I did!  Prior to all this mess I was playing Horizon Forbidden West CE on my G9 with full settings on. Blah!

 

so now ya know the story. What to try first?  Only thing I haven’t done is take out all the GPUs or swap the ram. Highly doubt it would matter, no cpu?  POST wont check anything beyond that

keep in mind the board DOES have “pins” to check voltages with a voltometer. Meh, maybe try that?

 

any, any ideas would be a great help. (Whining) I wanna play my games!

 

BTW as mentioned I have a usb with saved profiles on it. I been backing em up since I finished the build. If anybody has a way of viewing them (dono how, are they saved in text?) maybe that would provide best course of action?

[Hinjima]

28 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

Hi all, here we go again

-amd 5900x

-asus crosshair viii / WiFi (all was done with latest bios installed first - 5702 or something. Late march 2024) / ekwb waterblock made for the board, covers the vrms and cpu (only mounted with 4 screws but not fun to remove)

-4x Corsair vengeance 18@3600, 16gb each (QVL ok)

SIDE NOTE do have 4x 16@3200 16g sticks, nighthawks by teamforce. DOCP didn’t work / non qvl so swapped em out quite a while ago - no problems, just saying I have a spare set

-asus 4090 w custom waterblock

-xfx 6700 xt w custom block

-pci 1x to 16x riser, usb 3.0 (unused ATM but plugged in)

-quadro 4000 rtx

-more radiators than necessary

-all the fans are thermaltake something’s, high end/expensive. No RGB, either 2500/3000 rpm peak 120s and 140s

-thermal take dc5 pump with 500ml res.

-another dc5 pump connected to the drain ports on the top radiator (420mmx60mm) with a seperate 1L res. It’s there for redundancy and to help the primary pump cycle the water, yes that many radiators…. Still have one 140mmx60mm on “standby” waiting to be installed

MORE IMPORTANTLY

-seasonic 1000w bronze blah blah, ONLY powering the motherboard, cpu (aux cpu too) and 4090. Only powering the molex for the TT pump. I mean face it, I’ll use the best brand to power the most crucial stuff

-“gamemax” 1050w bronze powering 8x sata drives, the fan hub, 6700/quadro and molex to pump 2 (“jump started” with lol, one of my many mobo this pin to that pin things) this guys outside the case

-DO have a spare psu, seasonic 1500w PLATINUM, Corsair. Had it in a while ago then did math and figured out at 80% peak efficiency (assuming) I had ~1200w to work with. Say the least when the pc was under 100% load it couldn’t sustain and my system would just shut off. Again doing math, 230w max TDP on cpu, 75w per pci, 8x SSDs, fan hub, toss in the video cards…. Yeah. Should mention it’s an EU version (I guess it’s better than US?  I dono, wasn’t intentional), have a EU to US 120v power cable. It’s gotta be 12/10 gauge per wire, pos/neg/ground. Easy to find in my cache of pc stuff cause duh. It’s super thick

+since I noticed issues with power that’s when I took it out an opted for 2x PSU’s rather than one (thing was large too, had to pull out the aforementioned 140mm radiator to make room)

-thermal take TT71 view full/E-atx case, it’s all been taken apart to a skeleton since I did the psu swap.  Yes I did swap the Corsair power lines for the appropriate PSUs, pain in the butt

-both PSUs are plugged directly into the outlet and each outlets are on seperate breakers (haven’t tripped one… yet)

-2x Samsung 980 1tb nvmes, 2023 manufacture date, made in Korea or Vietnam… forget. HAD 2021 variants which thanks to Samsung failed to release a “notification” to update the firmware immediately or your drives will die. Just saying, anyone reading this, yeah…

-GPU’s are installed top to bottom in order mentioned

(think that’s all, at least what’s relevant?)

 

PROBLEM: Q-code reads 00, can’t do bios flashback via usb cause I noticed they don’t light up on POST. See “what I’ve tried” for more details. 
 

WHAT MAY HAVE HAPPENED: day prior I was fiddling with overclocking the CPU. Using HWinfo for duh, cinebench r23/aida64(prime95?)/nicehash(only cpu was enabled) for monitoring and writing down voltages per core, core “order” preferred. Basicallly I was handwriting cinebench scores (5 min stress multi and single), hashrates etc along with the values as reported by HWinfo, voltages/temps and so on. 
I had NOT been working with the PBO scalar at this point. ALL bios were stock aside from a few minor areas unrelated, SVM and 4g decoding, raid, disabled EDC (whatever for power efficiency/auto downstepping, ERP?)

anyway I had gotten to 46x multiplier in main menu, CCX 0/1 to 46 also. Power settings were set to “extreme”, 120% on cpu, 140 (I think) on DRAM. most settings were either enabled or left to auto. If I recall correctly I eventually just went to auto to eliminate variables

by the time I got to stressing it I wrote down values, my notes are in the office, I noticed at 4600mhz (cores aren’t set to go faster or slower) the mobo wouldn’t supply more than 1.300v per core, 12 total. At this point cinevench would crash and Nicehash would “blow up” the pc (immediate shut down)

so I toned it all down to 43x, ccd0/1 too. Figured I’d be on the safe side doing so, plus I got the best results in my notes. ~20100 on cinebench, .00890 hashrate (again may be inaccurate, notes upstairs)

tpu I and II set to “none”, uh that application preference thing to “none” (It has options for Geekbench, cinebench and 2 others)

BLCLK at 100.00

from there I had her mining all night, after a few hours I enabled the 3 GPUs. Woke up the next day and yep, all was still good and going. ~1.204v avg on all cores

So now I’m like… hmm. Let’s try to increase the voltage one step at a time and keep the everything the same. I have a saved bios profile on a USB of the most stable setup so why not?  I forget what the positive increments were but from none I hit “+” and it… offset, increased?  Idk whatever it did, by like .00264 something. The minimal amount

Saved, restart, windows was stable. Though I did notice the monitor would go blank on login (auto login via registry). The gpu would kick in (after the “dos” spinny image) and I’d see my username which has a profile pic of my dog, blank, dog again pc is thinking, blank, then desktop as usual. Mind you the “blank” was just black screen and basically a quick flicker

i don’t recall checking HwInfo, my assumption was my clock speed was too “low” for the additional voltage. I naturally figured no point in stressing it or checking

restsrt, bumped up one more (now we’re at + twice, so two “minimal” increments) and went to 4600 to compensate. 
I mean, 4600 worked fine aside from crashing due to the 1.3v “lock” I noticed the day before. Hence why I stepped it up a tad one last time

bam, BSOD loop. Whoopsie.

now this part I’m unsure as I don’t remember completely what I did. Back to bios, removed the voltage offset, went down to 43x all over, and I’m pretty sure I adjusted the VRM/delivery from extreme to optimal, put cpu voltage to 120% peak, down’ed the ram to 110%. Basically my mindset was I’m getting too excited and I had best stay in a safe bubble.

save/restart

ahhhhh darn, q-code of 00 and nothing. Literally no POST, waited watching the q-code LED and no change. Fudge!

 

WHAT HAVE I TRIED?

-first logical step, hit the clear CMOS button on the IO panel, the green one. It’s worked in the past just not with a 00 code. No dice

-thought for a second, looked at the manual. Hm, there’s a button on the motherboard for safe boot. Ok. Squeezed my finger in there blind and felt it (the little button isn’t by any others by far) and pushed it. Nope

-flipped off the power, waited maybe ten seconds then unplugged the PSUs. Waited idk ten minutes, reversed the above and hit the glowing start button.  Nothing. Tried safe boot again, nothing

-snap, now I’m in a pickle. Removed power sources as noted above and flipped the switch on the motherboard for SLOW MODE. Yes only switch on the bottom, mentioned in manual, yada yada. Power applied again, still 00. Well… let’s reflash the bios via the button and a usb

-flipped safe boot off, (done this before) and used a laptop (hp 8760w/32g/3x SSDs/m.2 as boot/datacenter 2022) to setup a usb. First used a 128g drive, went to format and duh, ntfs or exFAT. Nah that won’t work, plus it don’t have a blinky light as an IO indicator. Grabbed my BIOS drive with the saved profiles, shoved the same bios I have on it, root directory and renamed to C8HW.cap (whatever it should be). No go. It’s only a 512mb but I do know the pc is finicky about it and spits a Qcode if I load a profile/save/reboot and leave it plugged in. Eh maybe it’s just the stick, no biggie

-busted out my ziplock of flash drives. All varying capacities and brands. One drive was too large (according to manual it says = or less than 2gb) so I just did diskpart and cleaned the volume. Then cleaned the drive. Made a 1g partition at the “start” of the drive and fat32’d it. No dice again

1gb drive, another 512, and a 256mb (haha yep), all done same as above minus the partitioning. Just clean/format fat32 and “whatever”.cap. Nothing

read a thread that said sometimes using windows to unzip a file can corrupt a bios file. Winrar is a better option, ok

Last attempt, 512mb stick I usually use, same process just with winrar. Nothing

Manual says once the button goes blue it’ll blink and stay blue, could take some time but once it isn’t blue anymore it’s done. So pc is still sitting there with the blue light on and stuck in the obvious port labeled for flashback (just being descriptive for sake of a response asking if I used the correct usb port)

so far, nothing

-prior to the last/current usb, swapped cpu power from the seasonic to the “gamemax”. No go. Figure that was a pointless route since just below the power headers has a red light that stays illuminated if, duh, no power (provided the mobo has power). Power delivery is fine

-also removed cpu-opt fan from header. Removed HUB from cpu header and plugged in a spare fan. Still 00

-oh and left the pc with no power for at least 24 hours.  Both PSUs off and unplugged. Nothing - even without the “gamemax” PSU connected

 

CONCLUSION?

00 indicates a cpu issue or a motherboard issue. Taking a wild guess tinkering with the bios, trying to reflash it entirely messed it up. Without a UART flasher I can’t do it manually

also I might have messed the cpu up. Not sure if it’s plausible cause a MOBO of this… nature has failsafes built in to prevent “blowing it up”. I’ve had similar issues in the past and instead of panicking I just let it sit without power, then all would be fine

as mentioned the usb sticks never blink even without hitting the reflash button. So if the mobo don’t detect a cpu, it stops any POST attempts thereafter. Hence, no usb activity. Sure my crap via usb gets power, gaming mat and junk. Otherwise nothing

 

i dont have a spare cpu laying around to try out.  Kinda wish I did!  Prior to all this mess I was playing Horizon Forbidden West CE on my G9 with full settings on. Blah!

 

so now ya know the story. What to try first?  Only thing I haven’t done is take out all the GPUs or swap the ram. Highly doubt it would matter, no cpu?  POST wont check anything beyond that

keep in mind the board DOES have “pins” to check voltages with a voltometer. Meh, maybe try that?

 

any, any ideas would be a great help. (Whining) I wanna play my games!

 

BTW as mentioned I have a usb with saved profiles on it. I been backing em up since I finished the build. If anybody has a way of viewing them (dono how, are they saved in text?) maybe that would provide best course of action?

You got a TLDR for this?

Only joking of course.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

board is fucked and is probably just refusing to reset bios or the bios decided to nuke itself cause 00 = dead or no attempt whatsoever to post

 

yes 00 indicates either a cpu or mobo issue but this is without a doubt a mobo issue cause youd have to kill the cpu or have the cpu unpowered (like the eps disconnected) to get this code without a fucked mobo, and ive seen more fucked boards than cpus and cpus wise they only get screwed cause buying in bulk and theyre ancient cpus

 

only way id try saving it now would be to reflash the bios with a ch341a and some female - female jumpers, bios can be externally reflashed via the unmarked spi header located to the left of the text that reads socket 1331 (its above the leftmost part of the 1st m.2 heatsink thats above the 1st pcie x16 slot), pinout can be found here

 

next last ditch option is to take everything including all heatsinks off, clear cmos + short powerbutton, then rinse in water, dry for a day or 2. usually for boards that die cause theyre dirty but with how random board failiures are you might aswell try

 

and yes i have seen my fair share of board failiures after like 40-50 broken boards now from shorted powerbutton/reset that causes random restart to burning vrms (twice actually), refusing to turn on, internal shorts, random shelf death that cant even be fixed after dunking in water, stuck on a random postcode again not fixable, cmos refuses to work and does not save bios settings even with a known working battery, etc.

[scruffballz_86]

remove all you stuff and start with cpu and ram seated first to get bios first out of case !!! and make sure you setup up both bios's next time if it has it. Incase you mess one up !!! and the other bios is popping up blank since you never set it up. when it pops up blank have the usb in and there should be a spot to make it read the bios !!! I just hope the cpu moved from overclocked/heat !!! I used to own dual bios boards but you have to setup the other up all the time first !!! one would be the mobo version and the other would be theol blue uefi one !!! both will overclock !!!

[Cramig88]

1 hour ago, scruffballz_86 said:

remove all you stuff and start with cpu and ram seated first to get bios first out of case !!! and make sure you setup up both bios's next time if it has it. Incase you mess one up !!! and the other bios is popping up blank since you never set it up. when it pops up blank have the usb in and there should be a spot to make it read the bios !!! I just hope the cpu moved from overclocked/heat !!! I used to own dual bios boards but you have to setup the other up all the time first !!! one would be the mobo version and the other would be theol blue uefi one !!! both will overclock !!!

Ok, I’ll bite. 
One question though, can a mobo at least give output/bios to play with - without a cpu?

Not discounting your idea, just asking. It don’t seem possible as it needs to POST first

you do make a solid point in regard to programming BOTH bios rather than assuming “safe” means default. After all, bios A has been tinkered and updated since bought. Bios B, the failsafe, hasn’t been touched. Kinda like owning 2 cars yet car B has no fuel

[Cramig88]

2 hours ago, Hinjima said:

You got a TLDR for this?

Only joking of course.

Just trying to cover all the bases. If it’s both cpu and mobo were at around 1000$

 

at least it gave me a honest chuckle so that helped lol

[Hinjima]

13 minutes ago, Cramig88 said:

Just trying to cover all the bases. If it’s both cpu and mobo were at around 1000$

 

at least it gave me a honest chuckle so that helped lol

Absolutely!  The more info the better!

Its just that my ADHD panicked a bit

[Cramig88]

2 hours ago, Somerandomtechyboi said:

board is fucked and is probably just refusing to reset bios or the bios decided to nuke itself cause 00 = dead or no attempt whatsoever to post

 

yes 00 indicates either a cpu or mobo issue but this is without a doubt a mobo issue cause youd have to kill the cpu or have the cpu unpowered (like the eps disconnected) to get this code without a fucked mobo, and ive seen more fucked boards than cpus and cpus wise they only get screwed cause buying in bulk and theyre ancient cpus

 

only way id try saving it now would be to reflash the bios with a ch341a and some female - female jumpers, bios can be externally reflashed via the unmarked spi header located to the left of the text that reads socket 1331 (its above the leftmost part of the 1st m.2 heatsink thats above the 1st pcie x16 slot), pinout can be found here

 

next last ditch option is to take everything including all heatsinks off, clear cmos + short powerbutton, then rinse in water, dry for a day or 2. usually for boards that die cause theyre dirty but with how random board failiures are you might aswell try

 

and yes i have seen my fair share of board failiures after like 40-50 broken boards now from shorted powerbutton/reset that causes random restart to burning vrms (twice actually), refusing to turn on, internal shorts, random shelf death that cant even be fixed after dunking in water, stuck on a random postcode again not fixable, cmos refuses to work and does not save bios settings even with a known working battery, etc.

Looked up the cha341 thing, appears to be a usb dongle of sorts - simple explanation that is

i can’t force flash under standard USB as they don’t do anything but power output

cant say the board is dirty. Enticing as it sounds to dunk it in water should it be distilled, boards clean. Although burnt up VRMs or otherwise would seem more probable.

 

Although im VERY familiar with the smell of burning/whatever capacitors and so on. None of that. Less it got shorted, would make sense

Suppose I need a UART flasher (non usb, manual). Prior to that whip out the voltmeter and see if there’s trouble, one “pin” to ground at a time

 

in reality though, your probably right. The boards fried. If I gotta take it allllllll apart I might as well do it right.
Quite possible all my ideas wouldn’t pay off in time and effort rather than just swapping it

 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

7 hours ago, Cramig88 said:

Looked up the cha341 thing, appears to be a usb dongle of sorts - simple explanation that is

i can’t force flash under standard USB as they don’t do anything but power output

you connect it to a laptop or something and use some female - female jumper wires to hook it up to that unmarked spi header i mentioned, thats how you reflash

 

7 hours ago, Cramig88 said:

Suppose I need a UART flasher (non usb, manual). Prior to that whip out the voltmeter and see if there’s trouble, one “pin” to ground at a time

and how would you go about flashing via uart anyways? like what the hell header is that thing supposed to connect to? never really looked into uart

 

i would have probably reccomended desoldering aswell but these new bios chips arent sop8 and i have no idea how you desolder them nor what adapter board fits them