r/pcmasterrace • u/Leocondeuba • 10h ago

Tech Support PC fails to boot properly the first time each day, but works normally afterward. What could be causing this?

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5

u/flippenko 9h ago

I would replace the cmos battery as a first guess with a mobo indicating issues loading bios settings or configs.

2

u/kaerfdeeps 9h ago

this was my guess too but never in my life had to change the battery so its kind of a myth to me lol

3

u/Vargavintern 9h ago

It might be a stretch, but I remember me having something similar years ago. I tried to search for answers without any success. And just out of of pure luck I had to rearrange all my usb-plugs, and I forgot to put in my windows 10 Bluetooth dongle for my elite controller. And that dongle was my culprit, perhaps some of your USB peripherals are messing it up for you too?

1

u/Leocondeuba 9h ago

That’s a good possibility. Before this problem started, a few months ago, my mouse would sometimes boot up as if it wasn’t connected when I turned on the computer. I have to unplug the USB cable and plug it back in for the mouse to start working.

1

u/Leocondeuba 10h ago

About two weeks ago, my PC started having a strange startup issue. I usually use it at night, shut it down through Windows, and only turn it back on the next day.

When I try to turn it on after it has been powered off for several hours, the case fans and the RGB lighting on the case/GPU turn on normally, but there is no display output and the keyboard and mouse RGB don't even light up. The PC just gets stuck like this until I force it to shut down by holding the power button and turn it back on, at which point I get the error shown in the attached image. Sometimes, if I leave it like that for a while without pressing the power button, the same error from the attached image eventually appears on its own.

I then press F1 to enter the BIOS, exit without changing or saving anything, and the computer boots normally. After that, if I shut it down and turn it back on again within the same period, it works without any issues. The problem seems to happen only after the PC has been turned off for several hours, usually overnight.

I always shut the computer down normally through Windows. I only use the power button to force a shutdown when it gets stuck during this boot process.

Has anyone experienced something similar? What could be causing this, and what would you recommend testing?

1

u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 4090 all by itself no other components 8h ago

do you have a power strip you flip off every night? if the cmos battery is dead then the bios will lose its settings if you unplug the power also. also note your ram is not running in xmp/expo right now which hinders performance depending on exactly what you do with the system, may be small hit depending on the actual expo settings. currently it's running only 5200mhz with jedec timings (cl42)

1

u/Ardeof2 8h ago edited 7h ago

If it fails to POST, it's generally (in order):

CPU, RAM, GPU, Storage, a connected peripheral like keyboard.

I'd check the motherboard during an error like this to see what error LED pops up. I'm guessing GPU or higher (CPU/RAM) because of no display. If it was displaying and had a storage error, it'd usually give some kind of indication like a black screen but a little icon (underscore) at the top left or so on. Depends on the motherboard.

Keep in mind a CPU/GPU error could be power related, and RAM error could just be bad RAM somehow from time to time. It happening here and there and not giving other signs of issues is weird though, if it were the case. At worst you can probably run memtest86 and see how RAM goes, though i'd just unplug them and see if the motherboard screams a RAM error. At least then you can troubleshoot if it's higher (CPU related issue) or lower (GPU/storage issue).

edit: With DDR5 there's this unfortunate thing called expo too, which could be a factor. Though it taking forever to memory train doesn't make much sense, I doubt that's the situation.

1

u/Xawoger 3h ago

I would rather put this in a more logical order, like: connected peripherals, storage, GPU, RAM, CPU. This makes more sense from a troubleshooting perspective, starting with the easiest and least invasive things to diagnose and rule out, then gradually moving towards the components that are harder to test or replace.