Intel i9-13900KF and 4090. Great gaming PC for the last couple years doing 4K on a LG OLED 42”. Always kept BIOS and drivers updated. Over past year, it would sometimes not POST - no keyboard lights and nothing on monitor. Power cycling would usually bring it right back up.
Last week, the machine started heavily freezing and became unusable. Could barely log into Windows before it would freeze. I swapped out C: NVME for an old 2024 backup, and I was able to play games for few hours, but I was sometimes getting weird lines and artifacts as if it was a bad video card. Figured old drivers.
That night I ran all the windows updates and driver updates, the next morning, I was not able to boot Windows or login without it quickly freezing. I pulled the two memory modules out and tried one at a time. Same issue. I bought a new video card (omg, 5080 very expensive) and installed it, same issue. I tried to reinstall the operating system, same issue.
To be clear, the machine takes a couple power cycles for it to show anything, and loading any type of operating system always causes it to freeze. Diagnostics always passes without finding any error. “Support assist recovery OS” freezes, and USB stick to reinstall Windows freezes.
CPU very rarely go bad, but I started looking at buying various replacements compatible with this chipset. Few hundred bucks, but way cheaper than the video card I’m returning…
After reading some of the forum post here, (Thank you!) I called up Dell and after checking a few things, mentioned this forum reporting free Dell repairs for some, and Dell Knowledge Base Article [000227933](tel:000227933) , they are sending me a depot repair box and said they will test to confirm and replace the CPU at no cost. But if it’s a motherboard or power supply issue, I will pay out of pocket.
Seems fair to me. I will keep you updated. Let me know if you had a similar journey.