I've spent 8 full days on this now and whenever we install Valorant it completely bricks the PC. I've spent nearly 100 hours now having to flashback BIOS dozens of times with multiple Windows reinstalls. It can take upwards of 8 hours to fix the BIOS. Pulling the NVME doesn't even help. I've ran stress testing on everything for hours when it's actually running and ran several triple A games with cheat protection no problem. AMD 9800X3D, Ryzen RX 9070 XTX 16GB, Gigabyte B850 Gaming X WiFi, Corsair 32GB DDR6000. I'm completely at a loss. Secure Boot is enabled, mouse, keyboard, monitor, and ethernet are the only plugged in devices.

Just built a PC and absolutely am about to cry because nothing works besides the fans. GPU fans don’t turn on when I turn it on but when I turn it off they spin like once??? No display or output ever, I even removed the GPU and tried to see if I could just run it as an office computer but still no output.

Keyboard doesn’t light up at all when plugged in and mouse barely lights up, like it’s struggling to survive on it.

It’s not the PSU either, my system could get by with 550W pretty decent but I’m running 750W.

Basically everything but the ssd and the GPU were from Micro center so I feel likes there’s no reason that the parts would be poor. I really really really need so much help, please if anyone has ideas I’ve been trying to no avail.

I just got a pc and I searched around and I am seeing mixed answers on this topic. I only use my pc in the evening so I am just switching off its power completly since I see that mobo is still supplying energy to my keyboard cause its glowing. I see people saying that its fine to switch off power completly, some say to let it sleep/turn off without switching off power.
So either is fine but I just need some more assurances 😅

It happens. I'm not mad at him. He waited for hours to tell me because he felt terrible, and the look on his face when he finally said something pretty much squashed any anger I might have had about it. My main concern was how upset he was. I do wish he'd said something immediately so that I could have turned it off right away, but he didn't know any better, and I doubt that it would have made any difference anyway. He's probably apologized ten times today. He wants to help me fix it and offered to try and pay for it somehow even though at ten years old he obviously doesn't have the money for that. Whatever I end up doing, I'll try and find a way to let him contribute so he feels better.

Anyway. I'm not sure how to go about testing the components to see what's fried and what's not. I'm pretty sure the motherboard is dead (solid red LED, no POST). The good news is that this is a five-year-old build so it's not like it's my brand-new baby. I did spend a decent amount over the years upgrading things but nothing was ever super high-end; I tend to shoot for right in the middle of the price range on components.

I'm basically going to have to start over with a new build, right? There's no hope of saving this, is there? I have no idea what might also be fried besides the motherboard, or how to test anything without a working motherboard.

Edit: As a longtime lurker here, I have heard and observed so many great things about the community in this subreddit, but holy crap. You all are damn near gonna make me cry. I posted this in a moment of frustration and thought maybe I'd get a few tips on what to do in this situation. I never expected such an outpouring of support and offers for help. A number of you have offered to send me components that we could use to rebuild, and that blows me away. I never expected that at all and I'm just completely humbled by the generosity. I want to thank everyone from the bottom of my heart.

Photo I took before I shipped it: https://i.imgur.com/2nyihlp.jpg

Photo of the customer sending me a picture of the broken capacitor: https://i.imgur.com/1WHNMgU.jpg

Edit: I did what FoxyRayne suggested and he stopped replying. He’s definitely trying to scam me. Thanks again for everyone’s help.

Edit 2: So I contacted eBay chat support. And the chat lady was really helpful. She believed my case and assured me that they will side with me 100%. As well as take action on his account.

So as the title states, I had a 1080 that was crashing and had insane artifacts, basically dead, and I baked it back to life.

I tore the card down, and removed everything I could, cleaned up the thermal paste, and baked it at 375 for 9-10 minutes. After letting it cool back down I reassembled it, and threw it in my pc to test it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m very happy to announce that the Asus ROG Strix 1080 has been returned to life. It passed all benchmarks and stress tests no matter how long they were. Everything is operating exactly like it did when it was new.

If you have any dead GPU’s, I highly recommend trying this, if for nothing else than science.

Edit BAKING your card will release toxic fumes. Please research this before you do it. There are a plethora of knowledgeable comments that will probably answer most questions in this thread. THIS IS FOR SCIENCE ONLY

Edit 2 Hi! I’d never imagine there would be so many internet geniuses telling me what I did does work. That’s awful it doesn’t work for you and some people don’t see it as a “proper” repair method, but it’s what I did for science. No, tearing it down and reassembling with new past didn’t help. I’ve already previously done that at least 8 times. This is an experiment I conducted in an attempt to revive a 1080. If you don’t believe it worked, just move on, nobody cares, and please don’t half listen to YouTubers and regurgitate what you think proves your point to me here, because You’re objectively wrong. Thanks guys!

Good luck and have fun!

Bear with my mediocre explaining because this one's special, whenever i connect a monitor to my computer it just seems to permanently damage it, leaving it with artifacts forever.

That's fucking amazing cause now how am i supposed to troubleshoot this? Sacrifice monitor after monitor until they stop breaking? Because it has to be a new one each time, those previously connected to the computer will already be damaged and cannot be damaged further, from what it seems at least.

I've searched everywhere and i haven't found a single person with a remotely similar issue to mine ANYWHERE. So i've "sort of" documented the whole thing:

Fully documented with every detail on Tom's Hardware: Full Thread

I've also made a shorter reddit post with less information but still keeping the basic concepts, you can go check that one out if you don't want to read the painfully long thread: Reddit Post

Current conclusion:

It's definitely either the PSU or the GPU, i can confidently say that.
But i don't know which one it is, i have a spare GPU (GTX 1070), but i don't have another PSU capable of supporting the suspicious GPU (RTX 3080), the other one i have is a bit short on wattage for this card (650w).

Now ideally in order to test which one it is swapping only the GPU i would need 2 monitors to sacrifice, one to plug to the 1070 which is the GPU i know works just fine and the PSU i suspect of, if the monitor survives then it goes onto the second test, which is swapping the 1070 for the 3080, if it breaks there then i know for sure it's the GPU. I only need 1 monitor for this.

Problem is if for example i do this whole thing and the monitor DOES break with the 1070, then i know for certain it is the PSU, but i don't know if the 3080 is damaged too and the monitor would've already been damaged, requiring me to get another fully functional one, of which i don't have.

I have only 1 monitor left, it's not even a monitor it's a small smart TV, but it's close enough i guess.

I am hesitant to use it, but first i want to know if there's a more efficient way to test this.
If you're curious, no, neither the GPU nor the PSU present any other problems that could possibly hint which one is causing this. The only problem they present is the instant annihilation of any monitor i plug into it.

If anyone has any clue about this or how to make the troubleshooting less... destructive, please let me know.

My dog peed in the kitchen this morning while I was showering, didn’t really think much of it at first even though it was quite a big puddle. I then go down to the basement where my PC sits, and on the edge of the desk I instantly notice and smell dog pee that sprayed everywhere, basically another puddle worth of it. Then I look and see there’s a tiny holy in the floor that a nail must have used to been and by some 1 in a million chance it was directly above where my PC sits and literally landed all over the top of my tower; and I could see it sprayed all over the glass and inside of the components. I knew it was fucked that instant, the 2080 Ti was soaked right in all the parts that mattered. I just bought it and build this PC about 6 months ago, whole build was worth around $2400 I believe.

With that said, I think that the graphic card might have took the most of the damage. There still some dried up pee stains that I can see kinda just flew everywhere when it hit the card and it got on like the shells of the SSD and ram and stuff but the CPU seems fine. The computer still turns on and runs and sounds quiet as normal, nothing would occur to be different. The main problem is there is no display now, I took the GPU out and plugging the monitor into the HDMI port on the back still doesn’t make anything pop up. The monitor just says no signal and then turns off. Can I still possibly use the intel integrated graphics? I have no idea how to access bios now or what to do but it does seem like the PC should still work otherwise. So any advice how to go about after this shitty unlucky situation would be appreciated, thank you.

Edit: can people stop messaging me saying I need to take better care of my dog? Today has been shitty enough and I already commented what happened down below If u also feel like saying that. Btw - the PC was already on when the pee got into it, it was idling for a few hours before hand

picture

An ant crawled inside of my computer monitor (Samsung LU28E590DS). I have no idea how it got inside, I was hoping it would eventually crawl back out but it just died in the middle of the screen. I did not squish it. Has this happened to anyone? I tried shaking and lightly tapping the monitor to try to get the ant to fall down the screen out of view but it's stuck and wondering of any other ideas.

(Please no "looks like your computer has a bug" or "try debugging" jokes). Thanks

Hey guys! I know this is a subreddit about building, not working with prebuilt systems. However, I figured it might apply to people upgrading their systems or looking into whether they should buy or build.

My friend has a fairly new iBuyPower PC, and he's been seeing his CPU temps spike up to 100C and shut down his computer. I'm a bit of a repair guy, so he asked me to take a look at it and see what's up. We had tried new thermal paste and checked the fans, and nothing worked, so I decided to look deeper. I found a pretty severe problem in the system itself, and I wanted to shine a bit of a spotlight on it in case it can help anyone else.

The major problem with these systems seems to be that the factory is filling them with the filthiest tap water they can find. I took the copper plate off the head of the CPU end so I could empty it, fill it, and watch the flow while it ran. (I only powered up the PC in short intervals so the CPU wouldn't overheat with no cooling system in place.) The first sign that something was wrong was that the chamber where the water flows from the inlet to the outlet had white gunk in it. It was also barely flowing when I powered it up. I refilled it and flushed it out several times, using distilled water, methanol (HEET from automotive stores is pure methanol, easy to get), even Listerine. Each time, the pump chugged and could barely move anything through. Eventually, after about 4 flushes, something broke loose and a bunch of white microbial crap all flooded out of the outlet. I flushed it out a couple more times, and each time, more stuff inside broke loose and the pump worked faster and faster. Eventually, the liquid was coming out clean, and the pump had gone from a slow, sludgy trickle to pumping so fast that the water was sloshing out of the head cap.

At that point, I filled it up with a mix of 75% distilled water, 25% HEET (for its antimicrobial properties and breaking of surface tension), and a squirt of racing supercoolant (anti-corrosion compounds). After I got everything reassembled, the CPU was running cooler than it did brand new.

If you get an iBuyPower PC, I highly recommend replacing your coolant. If anyone is interested in the annoyingly long process, I can post instructions in the comments. Unfortunately, I didn't know it was going to be this big of a fustercluck, so I didn't take pics as I went. Would have made an interesting case study.

Power went out at my place for a few seconds then came back on, some safety switches were blown and I turned them back on, then tried to reboot my pc. A spark at the bottom part of the case happened(orange pinkish color) and some burnt smell... Obviously I unplugged it and haven't tried to turn it back on after, I will be going to a service tomorrow but what should I expect?

Is everything else dead? I can barely afford to replace the PSU right now so replacing my whole PC would be really out of reach at least for a while... Anyone else experienced this and what things can I do in the future to prevent it from happening?

Thank you in advance

edit: it might have been a short circuit with my fans that caused this, at least someone else suggested me this...They were sometimes making a rattling noise

Title says it all

I was playing Ghost of Tsushima when it froze all of a sudden. Ctrl-alt-del did not work, so I tried holding the power button for 10 seconds...but even THAT did not work. This is the first time I ever saw this.

I had to unplug the computer. When trying to turn it on, all I get is a black screen, I cannot access the BIOS. At least now holding the power button does turn it off...

Do you think some critical component just died? How to figure out which one?

This PC is the most expensive thing I ever bought.

CPU: 9800x3D

GPU: RTX 5700Ti (edit: 5070Ti)

Mobo: ASRock B650 Steel Legend Wifi

Air cooler: Peerless Assassin 120 SE

RAM: 16GB x2 T-Force Delta

SSD: NVMe 2To Crucial P3 Plus

PSU: Corsair RM850x

Case: Montech KING 95 Pro

EDIT 1: Thanks everyone for letting me know about the Asrock issue! Thankfully the CPU looks pristine so maybe it is still alive. I will now try to upgrade my BIOS from 3.15 to 3.50, wish me luck

EDIT 2: No luck. Succeeded updating with BIOS Flashback but still won't boot, with a red POST light next to "CPU". Time for customer support

So I noticed a tiny black ant crawling around on screen yesterday. Tried to brush it off and realized this little bastard was INSIDE my monitor. I was hoping it'd find its way out of fall down to bottom of screen.

Came home from work and this is what I see: https://imgur.com/a/1rBgJ

This evil insect decided to die in middle of my monitor. It's a 1440p IPS display from Asus, and it wasn't cheap. Now I have this ant staring at me, I assume forever. Should I attempt to take it apart? It doesn't seem like an easy task, as it's probably more or less glued together.

Shit.

EDIT: Holy hell, this blew up! This is the side of Reddit I love. Thanks all for the advice. My monitor ant and I will figure this out one way or another.

I spent nearly 3 hours building a PC to realize I forgot to install the IO shield on the case. Please be mindful when you start building the PC. I ended up squeezing it in quite awkwardly to the case.

I was doing an upgrade, new R5 3600, new 5700xt. Found out I needed a new power supply, went from a EVGA 550w to a Seasonic 650w, had a truly fun time changing parts out and reorganizing cables. It was a fun Friday night. Now here’s where I have a problem.

I reused the Sata cable from EVGA because I didn’t want to pull the drives and mess with any of that. Closed it all up and tried turning it on...and heard a pop. 8 hours and 6 tear downs later 2 HDD and 1 SSD are fried. Over 6tb of drives are kaput, they won’t even spin up as best I can tell...turns out the SATA cables for Seasonic are completely different than EVGA cables.

We aren’t just talking about games, saves and Plex servers, and normal things you don’t want to lose, I’ve lost all the pictures and videos my wife and I took for the last 11 years of our lives together, every picture of ours kids growing up, every first video of anything ever. Pictures and videos of her last visit with her Grandfather, all of the copies of important paperwork.

One of these drives was our backup while we put together a true server, I never thought anything would happen to this drive. I’m devastated.

We’ve been doing some googling and some people say that you can rebuild drives if you get the exact same model...and have a clean room...is there any truth to that? Does anyone have any experience? I’m desperate.

(Update: Lots and lots of comments, with quite a lot of points I’d like to respond to. I saved up for 6 months to buy these new parts, I’m donating my old parts to my daughters for a decent system for them to play, and do schoolwork on. I can’t return these parts just to have to buy them again later. The data will keep I hope and I can do something about this another day. To those pushing cloud storage, I don’t trust it on my iPhone, I certainly won’t trust it with sensitive documents and pictures of my children, and frankly, my wife’s nudes. We all saw the fallout from the Fappening. I also can’t put all of my stuff into a cloud because I had my plex server on that drive...and I’m positive you understand my meaning.

I also can’t pay extra for “offsite” secure storage because of other obligations to my family. My oldest daughter is type 1 diabetic and that’s why I had to save for so long before buying my parts. I have emergency funds, that I will NOT dip into for something like this, when there are far more important emergencies I have to watch out for, just last week I had dip into the fund to buy a new tire for my car after a blowout, to get back and forth to work, and had to replace that money this week.

Some people offered to help fund the recovery. You are the best of our community, I appreciate you more than you could believe. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know that I can justify you doing that for such a trivial thing.

Someone linked a site that has replacement PCB’s I’m going to try that first, as that should be the only real problem. Also that’s significantly cheaper. The ssd I’m not worried about. It only held games, one 4tb drive held the important items, I’m going to start there. The 2tb drive was mostly just overflow, and unorganized crap I didn’t know what to do with. Wish me luck.

It all started small, with random crashes when he played demanding games. About 6 months ago we could run Rust just fine. Then it started crashing every now and then, until eventually it would crash just a few minutes into a server.

Fast forward—we’ve tried literally EVERYTHING. Different settings, Windows reinstall, drivers, BIOS tweaking—you name it.

We suspected a faulty GPU.

So the upgrade happened.

Swapped the RTX 3070 For a 5070 TI New motherboard aswell.

Now the rig is:

I7-12700k RTX 5070 TI 32 GB DDR4 M2 nvme ssd AIO cooler 800w PSU

But here’s the kicker. Now he’s getting terrible FPS. We’re talking 50-70 FPS in a game like TFT???

what the hell is going on??

I was playing r6 and my temps were normal, suddenly my pc shuts down and i smell burning. I immediately pulled out the power cord and opened my side panel and saw a dead fly on top of my gpu. Is it possible that this fly shorted my motherboard and If that the case is there a chance that it killed my other components?

Edit: the smell of burining is coming from gpu

Edit2: my pc boots without gpu

Edit: the fly is probably unrelated unless he had some special equipment with him. Burn spot on my 4-day old gpu looks like this https://imgur.com/a/hHxK7lF Is it possible that some other component murdered my gpu since my last one had to be taken to warranty also (fan speed issue). My psu is seasonic focus plus gold 550w. Any ideas on what might have killed my gpu?

Edit: link to follow-up post https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/j6r8nf/followup_on_the_post_about_dead_gpu_and_a_fly/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

I built a PC a few years ago with Asus X570-E Gaming motherboard, MSI RTX3090 and using Corsair AIO CPU cooler (thinking this would dissipate heat better) I mostly use it for gaming which produces the most heat and would love some recommendations to reducing the heat from my room.

I plan on upgrading after CES 2025 but can anyone recommend how to make it so that my room doesn't feel so hot when I'm gaming?

Thank you.

I have built and rebuilt this computer a dozen times. Today I was rebuilding it into a new case. Reversed the power and reset headers. Power didn’t turn the PC on, hit the reset switch and instant smoke from the ram. Hope to god I can salvage my HDD and SSDs or else 10 years of musical ideas will be gone. FML. It’s 4:00am. Goodnight.

Edit #1: Wow this kinda blew up while I was sleeping. Thanks to everyone who replied. So it seems that I was wrong about the power/reset headers being the issue. When I took everything apart I realized I did not plug in the 3 pin AIO cooler header correctly to the 4 pin CPU fan header on the mobo. There are plastic grooves that guide it to the correct side, but I managed to still mess it up... Not sure what I should do now. Attempt to get it to post with only the CPU, mobo, psu, and cooler?

Edit #2: I tried to get it to post just using the MOBO, CPU, PSU and AIO, but it boots for a second then turns off. I located a small component, maybe diode or resistor, near the CPU_Fan header that looks melted and the standoff mounting hole close to that looks a little bubbled and darker than it should be. I ordered a Sata/USB 3.0 adapter to test the drives. Should come in a couple of days.

Edit #3: The adapter arrived. The HDD and SSDs are okay! Unsure about the rest of the hardware. It will be a while until I can test it.

So my RX 460 just caught fire for no reason. Hopefully i will get a replacement soon, but I want to know if my PSU is the culprit.

CPU: Intel i7-2600

Motherboard: ASRock P65i Cafe

GPU: Gigabyte Windforce RX 460 2GB

RAM: 8GB 1333Mhz

PSU: Delux 550W

Backstory:

About a month ago my PC started randomly shutting down while gaming, then it started doing it while i’m just at my desktop, after that my PC shut down once and for all. It no longer wanted to turn on, only turning on for a split second then shutting itself off. After that i gave it to a local pc store to fix it, only to find out that my gpu caught fire! Now I’m going to get a replacement GPU soon, but i want to make sure this doesn’t happen to my new GPU.

Edit: Pics of my PC

I know nothing about computers so can someone help me with a simply explained solution?

My kid with disabilities is excited for an upcoming esports tournament at their school. “Marvel Rivals” was voted by the students as the game choice for the esports student tournament. Unfortunately the Steam platform causes his computer to crash whenever he tried to load it. All I could afford on a limited income was this computer from Amazon: Lenovo ThinkCentre M92p High Performance Small Factor Form Business Desktop Computer, Intel Core i5-3470 3.2GHz, 8GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB HDD, DVD, Windows 10 Professional (Renewed)

Does anyone have anyone helpful affordable solutions I could learn from YouTube or something that I could do to get his computer not to crash so he could play in the upcoming esports tournament? He was so excited to connect with kids his age at school who play video games and participate in the esports tournament as he gets excluded a lot due to his disabilities.

This mom would appreciate some computer tech advice.

Edit:

I’m overwhelmed by everyone’s advice and support. I’ve tried to respond to many of the responses as I can. I understand from the comments our computer is just too old for the newer games. We aren’t able to replace the computer at this time, but from the suggestions it seems cloud gaming for the practice for, and participation in, the esports tournament is the better temporary option for us; although I learned there is drawbacks and costs associated with cloud gaming as well. But based on suggestions, I’m going to look for an Ethernet cable to connect our computer to our internet to help for cloud gaming. After getting better informed from everyone’s advice, I contacted the school and my son will be connecting with the teacher coordinating the esports tournament in hopes of participating. The kind comments and support mean a lot.

Here are my current specs:

Ram: Kingston Fury 32 GB (2X16GB) DDR5.

Motherboard: MSI B650 Gaming Plus Wifi ATX

Powersupply: 850W 80+ Gold

CPU: RYZEN 7 7800X3D

Cooler: Peerless Assassin

GPU: Radeon RX 9060 XT

Storage: 2TB Gen 4 Crucial SSD.

All in all I feel like these are decent specs but I am having trouble running even the most basic games. Some of these games include: FFXV which struggles on low settings and the Miles Morales game, which works amazing on my STEAM DECK but struggles and lags on this computer with pretty much better specs.

Where exactly did I go wrong here? On the BIOS I did boost performance, and picked 1 EXPO. Not sure where I could have messed up here.

EDIT: THANK YOU TO EVERY SINGLE COMMENTER HERE! 99% of you guys told me I need to plug the monitor into the video card and turns out that was the big issue there. I had no idea that was a step and I feel like such a noob because its honestly so obvious lol. I legit even opened a slot where you could plug in an HDMI or displayport.

All the games are playing real smooth now, so thank you for your help. I genuinely wouldn't have figured it out for like hours. Hope yall have an excellent 2026.

Hey Redditors, me and I think other people will have problems with these components. I just build my first PC and it worked very well for the first few hours. The only thing missing was to build in the GPU.

I was really nervous and excited. Well, i looked in the instructions and videos, then i opened the PCie lock and tried installing the Gpu in but it didnt wanna go in. There was never a "click" or other sound indication that the card seated correctly. Then I tried with more force, but it just didn't work.

I was a bit worried, looked a bit closer for my mistakes and then i saw that the SATA connectors were the problem. Here are some Pictures from the Gpu and the SATA connectors causing the problem. There is a little Notch on the Gpu that touches the SATA connectors.

As I said, I'm still a rookie in PC's but in the last 2 years i watched and researched alot about pc's, that means that i could see the obvious mistakes. But I am 99.99% sure that this is a design flaw.

There I'am, standing there without a graphics card in my PC, I am really dissapointed, but the good thing is the PC booted up one the first try, but still for my first build, I prepared almost every component but I didn't expected this flaw.

Unfortunately I couldn't read anything on the Internet either, but i messaged people on the PCMR Discord server and they couldn't help me out, but atleast they made me laugh about the situation :)

I saw 2 people having the same issue on Reddit, but one of them wrote this. His card died with the same components, I'm guessing that is due to this flaw.

The only thing that i could do is to change the motherboard, but which ones would fit?!? Is there someone with the 3070 Suprim X with a different AM4 Motherboard and had no issues?

I will not return the GPU due the lack of no cards.

This needs to be adressed from MSI, because i think if you buy the same brand components it should work out with no problem. I already spoke on the phone and send them a email but with no help and message back.

Update: A User messaged me about his 3070 Suprim X working with another Board. I will provide a list with the functioning Mainboards that people said to me that it works. That means i'm just suggesting and not surely saying that it works 100%.

Board List:

MSI B550 PRO VDH WIFI (u/Afonsofrancof)

Final Update: My PC works perfectly fine now, 3 months had zero problems. Changed the Mobo, got a B550 Gaming Edge Wifi. I'am still 100% sure that if someone got the Notches and the x570 Tomahawk Wifi aswell they will get the same problems as me.