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PC builders please help: new build, endless power cycling, no POST.


Starship Krupa

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Well, not a completely new build, but new to me.

Thanks to a kind donation of various components from a fellow forumite, I have the opportunity to level up once again. My current system is an i7-6700 with 32G of DDR3 (weird, because 6770's can take DDR4, but this was a bargain on CL for a hundy).

What he sent me was an ASRock Fatal1ty motherboard with an i7-6950X. Not a big level up in speed, but cores for days, which IME, DAW's and NLE's really love. Mobo also accepts DDR4. Along with this was a sweet Noctua tower cooler.

Couple of 8G RAM sticks and NVme drive from Amazon and we're ready to go. Or should be.

While waiting to pick up the case, I decided to set it up in "breadboard" configuration, where you rest the motherboard on its box, hook everything up and give it a test run. The 6950X, being built for RAW overclockable speed, has no onboard video, so I put my old GTX550Ti in.

Hit the power button on the board, and the fans (including the power supply fan) spin up and....spin back down again, then spin back up, then back down, ad infinitum. Never gets to POST, nothing on the monitor.

The power supply is a nearly new Evga 500W that was recently powering my daily driver, plenty of juice for this scenario. I have tried:

  • A different video card, a GT 720 that is very light on wattage requirements.
  • Checking multiple times that all power connectors are correctly connected
  • Reseating the RAM.
  • Reseating the CPU.
  • Booting without the SSD installed.
  • Booting with a single RAM stick, in various slots.
  • Booting with no RAM.
  • Booting with no mouse or keyboard.
  • Booting with a Windows installer thumb drive.
  • Disconnecting the power supply from the board and reconnecting it.
  • Clearing the CMOS, both with the jumper and the CMOS-clearing button
  • Flipping the switch to boot from the backup BIOS.
  • Connecting extra fans to see if it didn't like booting without "case" fans.
  • Letting it cycle for an hour to see if it just needed to properly enumerate everything.
  • Popping the CMOS battery.
  • Unplugging the power supply and letting everything sit overnight.
  • Installing it in the case once it arrived.

Same behavior in all scenarios. There's a 2-digit "Dr. Debug" display on the board, but it never gets as far as lighting up.

I PM'd the guy who sent it to me and he said that at one point he had the same issue but doesn't remember how he got past it. Deep Googling reveals that while many have had the issue, they "solved" it by getting an RMA from ASRock.

My inclination was to write the board off as damaged in shipping somehow (although it was packed pretty securely), but since the donor says that he had the same issue and managed to get past it, I figure it's worth trying to bang my head against it for a while, or at least until I can locate a replacement board to go with the CPU.

The things I haven't tried are making a beep speaker to hook up and swapping in the extra i7-6800K he sent along. This is because in situations like this, it's very seldom the processor. I will try both before giving up, though.

Thinking about it, since even the PSU's fan is spinning up and back down, it looks like it's throwing juice at the board, then either not getting a "power okay" signal or getting a "dirty power" signal back from the board. I don't know how to check for this.

I can operate a DMM and oscilloscope and have both.

Suggestions, condolences welcome....

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3 hours ago, Kevin Perry said:

Dirty power switch?

It happens whether I power it on with the motherboard's own power button or the one on the case.

The duty cycle on the spin up/spin down is very regular. It goes up for about 15 seconds, then down for about 2 seconds, repeat.

Edited by Starship Krupa
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7 minutes ago, Jack Stoner said:

I had one of those motherboards.  "had" is the key word.    

Replace the 2032 CMOS backup battery as a first step.  This will also reset the BIOS to factory defaults.

I removed it and it measured about 2.9V, which I figured was still in the range of "good."

Also, since the original post, I made a "beep speaker." Got no beeps.

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We see a lot of problems on the Dell support forums that are fixed with new battery, regardless of voltage.

Disconnect the AC power cord to the power supply.  Press power button for 10 seconds to drain any residual power, remove the 2032 battery for 10 minutes then install new battery, reconnect AC power cord and try.

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1 hour ago, HIBI said:

I've seen a report of a similar cycle (spin up and spin down) on an ASRock Fatal1ty due to one CPU socket pin being bent. I hope this will be a hint for guessing the cause.

Googling "ASRock Fatal1ty power cycling" results in a distressing number of hits. I read that in one case, the person loosened the clamp on their cooler and it went away.

Now that you bring it up, I installed the Noctua per the factory instructions, but I haven't tried backing off a little on its clamp screws to see what happens. It could be that it's flexing the board enough that pins aren't making contact.

A thing I need to remember about CPU cooling is that while CPU's these days are tough to "burn up," insufficient cooling will result in them slowing themselves down or going into error states. I remember when that wasn't true, when people were frying their CPU's with overclocking.

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I've built about 15 desktops over the last 10 years, some for me and some for others.  Only motherboards that I had bent CPU pins were ASRock,  and one was a Fatal1ty board.   However, since it worked and if the CPU was not removed/reinstalled I wouldn't suspect bent CPU pins on this board.

EDIT:  I went back over your initial post and see that you did change/reinstall CPU so a bent pin is sus

Edited by Jack Stoner
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1 minute ago, Jack Stoner said:

since it worked and if the CPU was not removed/reinstalled I wouldn't suspect bent CPU pins on this board

The first time I tried to boot it, I hadn't pulled the CPU, but the guy did of course need to remove that honkin' Noctua tower cooler in order to ship it. So I just re-pasted it and installed the cooler per the Noctua instructions, which call for some serious tightening. When I later removed the cooler and CPU to look for bent pins, the paste looked fine, no indication that there had been too much pressure.

There was no stray goop lurking around either. I guess he and I know our oats about heatsink paste.

The CPU is not the first one that he had in there, at some point he upgraded from a 6800X, which he also sent along. Haven't tried swapping that in yet, but I will before I buy a replacement motherboard.

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43 minutes ago, Jim Roseberry said:

Power spin up/down in endless loop is usually either power-supply, motherboard, or (less often) video card.

As was suggested, I'd disconnect power, pull the CMOS battery for 12+ seconds, then reinsert the battery and try booting.

This will reset the BIOS.

The king has spoken!

Well, let's see. The power supply is a 6 month old EVGA 500W that was powering my current daily driver until I found a Corsair RM650X on CL for $50. I've tried two video cards, both of which have functioned well in other systems: a GTX550Ti and a GT 720 (in case it was a matter of too much power draw).

I have pulled the battery, used the reset BIOS jumper, pressed the reset BIOS button on the mobo, and even flipped the switch to invoke the backup BIOS. Same behavior.

The only things I have yet to try are swapping out the PSU (the only other one I have available is in my daily driver, so pain) backing off on the Noctua's clamp screws and swapping the CPU out for the 6800X.

Sure would like to know what the previous owner did to get past this issue when he had it.

I'm pricing LGA 2011-V3 motherboards on eBay. 😐

Kinda pricey for my budget, but Microsoft has helped out by ensuring that Windows 11 won't install.

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4 hours ago, Jim Roseberry said:

If this is the "solution", there's a problem with the CPU (as mounted).

You want the cooler surface to be making best contact possible.

I'm not worried about starting it up with the mobo horizontal and the cooler loosened a notch, as a troubleshooting step.

If it suddenly comes to life as a result of that test, it would suggest that there might be an issue with the cooler. Could've gotten damaged in shipping, might not have been installed correctly in the first place.

I'm at the straw-clutching phase anyway. Anything other than the same spin up/spin down would be welcome.

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10 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I'm at the straw-clutching phase anyway. Anything other than the same spin up/spin down would be welcome.

I'd reseat the CPU...

That's more of a long-term solution (that was my point).

You might also reseat all power connections to the motherboard (worth a try)

Edited by Jim Roseberry
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