PC No Longer Displays Anything, Might Be a Larger Issue

[UrPokemon]

 

Okay so I'm going to tell this whole story since I have little idea of what happened. But before then here are my PC specs:

 

Case - Corsair 200R

PSU - Corsair CX600M

Motherboard - msi 970A-G43

CPU - AMD FX 6300 Black Edition

CPU Fan - Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo

RAM - 16 GB of G.Skill (2 4gb sticks + 1 8gb)

GPU - XFX R9 280X DD

Storage - 2 HDDs (1tb and 3tb) + SSD (128gb)

 

This morning I booted my 3-year-old PC and was about to play Overwatch, but it froze. I've known for a while that the reason for the freezing was my SSD, but I just hadn't gotten around to fixing it. So I go into my BIOS to perform the fix that I found online and I notice that my CPU is at 86°C while idling. That can't be right.

 

So I looked at my CPU fan and it had stopped spinning. I took the CPU fan off and messed with it a bit but I found that flicking it didn't spin it: it had gunked up or something. Well, I decided to see if dust had gotten inside the motor area by blowing some compressed air into it. Nothing. So I decided I could use the old stock cooler that came with the CPU since it should have been sufficient. It wasn't in the CPU box, rather, it was in my CPU fan box. And the thermal paste, that was pre-applied, had smeared all over. Since I don't own any extra thermal paste I decided I would clean it up with some tissue so it didn't go off the CPU and keep the thermal paste that was where it was supposed to be where it was supposed to be.

 

Problem is, I don't have the mounting hardware for it. I had these plastic pieces that an AMD stock cooler would go on and some screws, but no nuts to keep them attached to the mounting bracket. I messed around a bit trying to find screws and or nuts to work but found nothing in my home.

 

So I looked up what to do and found people suggesting to put a different fan on there. I had noticed earlier that Cooler Master provides extra radiator clip-on mounts and I took a spare 120mm fan, put those on.

The problem was I had already removed the mounting bracket and the screws and the radiator. So I reinstalled those. But the nuts kept falling out of my hands and into the area behind the motherboard. They've done this before, in fact, I found them loose already when I opened up the whole thing. So I had to wiggle those out...not the safest thing but sort of the only thing I could do I guess.

 

Anyways, I finally mount the mounting bracket and attach the radiator. Plug the fan in, snap it on to the radiator, plugged the PC into all my stuff and booted it. Nothing. Well, I plugged the fan into the non-CPU fan header (because I stupidly but the fan on before plugging it in despite the header being behind the fan) so maybe it was having problems with not having a CPU fan. I try to take off the fan but I accidentally shift the radiator and I had to slide it back on top of the CPU. So I take it off more intelligently, plug it into the CPU fan header, remount the fan, and boot the PC. Nothing.

 

All the fans are spinning. CPU fan, case fan, GPU fans. Hard drives are humming, front panel IO lights are blinking. The only thing I can tell is different (since my Mobo doesn't have postcodes) is that motherboard USB isn't working. My keyboard is backlit but the lights don't go on. My headset has a glow around the mic button to indicate "muted" that, when booting, turns purple for a second and then turns blue when windows start, but it keeps blinking purple. My headset is plugged into a PCI-E USB hub so I plugged it into the Mobo USB: no lights at all.

I suspect that I messed up my CPU and part of my motherboard (if that's even possible). But I really don't know how to further diagnose or repair.

Any ideas?

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Clear the CMOS and see where that gets you. Clearing the CMOS essentially clears all of your custom BIOS settings and reverts everything to factory defaults. 

[aezakmi]

remove all of the memory sticks and try to boot it that way, you should hear some beeps, turn it off and place a single stick in slot #4 then clear cmos and boot again, if you can see the BIOS just turn it off again and put all of the sticks back.

[UrPokemon]

1 hour ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Clear the CMOS and see where that gets you. Clearing the CMOS essentially clears all of your custom BIOS settings and reverts everything to factory defaults. 

I can't even get to the BIOS, keyboard is seemingly non functional and display never, not even for a second, shows anything.

[UrPokemon]

1 hour ago, aezakmi said:

remove all of the memory sticks and try to boot it that way, you should hear some beeps, turn it off and place a single stick in slot #4 then clear cmos and boot again, if you can see the BIOS just turn it off again and put all of the sticks back.

I don't have a speaker for beep codes, will try to get my hands on one tomorrow. I'll try the RAM thing.

[UrPokemon]

1 hour ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Clear the CMOS and see where that gets you. Clearing the CMOS essentially clears all of your custom BIOS settings and reverts everything to factory defaults. 

Nevermind, sorry, I didn't realize you could reset CMOS through hardware. Anyways, I tried resetting by removing the power cable and battery for a few minutes and replacing. Still nothing on screen, though there's a new development: the front panel lights for hard drive and power are no longer turning on.

[UrPokemon]

1 hour ago, aezakmi said:

remove all of the memory sticks and try to boot it that way, you should hear some beeps, turn it off and place a single stick in slot #4 then clear cmos and boot again, if you can see the BIOS just turn it off again and put all of the sticks back.

Didn't change anything.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

3 minutes ago, UrPokemon said:

Nevermind, sorry, I didn't realize you could reset CMOS through hardware. Anyways, I tried resetting by removing the power cable and battery for a few minutes and replacing. Still nothing on screen, though there's a new development: the front panel lights for hard drive and power are no longer turning on.

Look in your motherboard manual on their official way of clearing the CMOS. It's typically a jumper near the CMOS Battery (CR2032) that you'll need to short with a screwdriver or anything conductive for about 10-15 seconds. Some boards will even have a CLR_CMOS button on the ear I/O or somewhere on the board. 

[UrPokemon]

19 minutes ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Look in your motherboard manual on their official way of clearing the CMOS. It's typically a jumper near the CMOS Battery (CR2032) that you'll need to short with a screwdriver or anything conductive for about 10-15 seconds. Some boards will even have a CLR_CMOS button on the ear I/O or somewhere on the board. 

Shorted the two pins for CMOS reset by the manual's directions. Still nothing displays and still the front panel lights don't turn on (besides a little HDD light flash when pressing the power button). I think CMOS is reset since the lights changed, but in that case, something is wrong with the graphics card/DVI cable?

[aezakmi]

I remember my FX doing it too, but most of the times it was solved by doing the RAM thing and clearing cmos, only 1 time I had to remove the graphics card, put a different one in a different slot (#2) boot to windows and then put back mine for it to work

 

A friend has a 6300 and it did the exact same thing yesterday so I went to his place, tried all of that and somehow we solved it using a VGA monitor instead of his HDMI, I don't know how or why that worked but it fixed it, it's just a random issue with the platform itself so there's no actual way to know what causes the black screens or how to fix them, it's just trying everything until something fixes it.

 

AMD is strange.

[StarfleetCap]

3 hours ago, aezakmi said:

remove all of the memory sticks and try to boot it that way, you should hear some beeps, turn it off and place a single stick in slot #4 then clear cmos and boot again, if you can see the BIOS just turn it off again and put all of the sticks back.

If the mobo has a speaker. The external ones might not be working as well.

[UrPokemon]

 

1 hour ago, aezakmi said:

I remember my FX doing it too, but most of the times it was solved by doing the RAM thing and clearing cmos, only 1 time I had to remove the graphics card, put a different one in a different slot (#2) boot to windows and then put back mine for it to work

 

A friend has a 6300 and it did the exact same thing yesterday so I went to his place, tried all of that and somehow we solved it using a VGA monitor instead of his HDMI, I don't know how or why that worked but it fixed it, it's just a random issue with the platform itself so there's no actual way to know what causes the black screens or how to fix them, it's just trying everything until something fixes it.

 

AMD is strange.

I did try that before the RAM thing, went from DVI to a HDMI monitor. I haven't tried a different graphics card slot yet, I'll give that a shot.

[UrPokemon]

11 hours ago, aezakmi said:

I remember my FX doing it too, but most of the times it was solved by doing the RAM thing and clearing cmos, only 1 time I had to remove the graphics card, put a different one in a different slot (#2) boot to windows and then put back mine for it to work

 

A friend has a 6300 and it did the exact same thing yesterday so I went to his place, tried all of that and somehow we solved it using a VGA monitor instead of his HDMI, I don't know how or why that worked but it fixed it, it's just a random issue with the platform itself so there's no actual way to know what causes the black screens or how to fix them, it's just trying everything until something fixes it.

 

AMD is strange.

I tried a different slot for the GPU, didn't work. I think the CPU is dead. I have no way of knowing, but if it helps, the monitor goes straight to standby, an stays in standby if I reboot the PC.