Possible Motherboard Problem

TreeLove · September 10, 2015

Roughly one month ago my keyboard (Corsair K70) and mouse (Logitech G700s) would become unresponsive and have their LED lights flicker on and off until they eventually went off altogether. Other keyboards were also not responsive if I plugged them into the USB ports at the back and the problem was only solved by restarting my system. Generally this would occur as frequently as once every 30 minutes or so, or sometimes as rarely as once every 6 hours. However the USB ports with my external hard drive, printer, iPod, etc. all still seemed to function. I could get my keyboard to function by plugging it into one of those ports without a restart. I ended up trying out a lot of solutions I found through google searching - none of which solved the issue at hand. Ultimately I feared (and still do) that the issue is related to my motherboard itself and not some sort of driver or software issue.

However, things became more complicated. One solution my friend suggested to me, that I was considering doing before this issue came to pass anyways, was to upgrade to Windows 10, which I did. Upon upgrade I found a ran into a variety of additional random issues while my USB port issue persisted. I circumvented this USB port issue temporarily by using a USB 3.0 hub on one of the consistently working ports, moving my external HDs, etc. into that port and my keyboard/mouse into the other ones that had not had any issues. However life on Windows 10 did not go as I had hoped. About 1-2 weeks after the initial upgrade to Windows 10 I found that my computer would abruptly turn itself off and then immediately back on when I was gaming (Diablo 3). This just furthered my fears of hardware problems so I ran Diablo 3 again with RealTempGT and MSI Afterburner open on my 2nd monitor to see if it was an overheating issue; and while the temperatures appeared normal and stable, the computer continued to restart itself. So then I ran Prime95 and MSI Kombuster separately for over 30 minutes each without having my computer restart itself and was left feeling confused as I still could not keep Diablo 3, World of Wacraft, or Wolfenstein Enemy Territory open for longer than 1-2 minutes without my computer inevitably restarting.

Simultaneously to I found that my Windows Key had become unresponsive and that the Windows Icon and start menu no longer functioned at all, among other problems. After a couple frustrating hours on the phone with Microsoft in which they were unable to help me even restore the functionality of the Windows Icon they suggested trying to perform a clean install of Windows. With no USB device present or other physical media to hold the installer for Windows 10 (which I frankly had grown to dislike quite a bit anyways) I ended up installing a clean version of Windows 7. Within minutes of my install however, my Keyboard and Mouse became unresponsive and began to flicker (whilst plugged into the alternative USB ports I switched them to earlier in an effort to bandage my problem). I'm uncertain if I will be able to run a game without crashing as I have not tried that yet however I plan to in the morning.

And that's where I am now. Any thoughts/help? Is this a motherboard issue? Or is it something software related. Not sure how to acquire/what are dump files.

Specs:

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit / Windows 10 64 Bit

MSI Z79-G45 (BIOS was last updated in January 2014, I found a new version of it that I need to install - need to borrow a USB Stick)

Samsung SSD 840 Pro 256GB

WD Black 1TB Storage

MSI GTX 770 Lightning (Stock)

Intel i5-4670k (Overclocked to 4.2GHZ)

16GB Ram (x2 Corsair Vengeance 8GB)

Corsair HX750

Please help x.x

-Thanks

Albie · September 11, 2015

Try a different PSU, I've had my keyboard/ mouse and USB ports play up and eventually my computer started shutting down by itself, got a new PSU and it all fixed itself.