Did I make a boo-boo?

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Dec 17, 2023
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Okay let me just start from the beginning...earlier this year I got myself an ASUS TUF B550 Gaming Plus WIFI II motherboard bundled with an R5 5600x on Amazon. Then about a month ago I upgraded from a Zotac RTX 3070 to an ASUS TUF RTX 4070. I also got myself a new CPU cooler; a Vetroo V5 because the Wraith Max I previously had was just way too loud for my taste. I guess it had to work harder to cool the 5600x as apposed to my 3600 I had previously.

Anyway, everything went smoothly. The 4070 worked great, the new cooler worked great, everything was fine. I should also mention that I updated to the latest BIOS about a week or so ago from today. Version 3404, and I experienced no issues until a few nights ago when I noticed one of the fan clips on my Vetroo cooler wasn't fully inserted in one of the holes on the fan. So I shut the system down, popped off the side panel and popped the clip into its rightful place. "No harm done", I thought.

Powered the system back on, booted into Windows, logged in. Everything seemed normal. Played some RoboCop, watched some youtube videos afterward, nothing out of the ordinary. However before bed I noticed I had a Windows update. I believe it was the cumulative update 22H2 or whatever. So I installed it, no big deal. Right? My PC rebooted, and here is where all the "FUN" began...

The ASUS TUF splash screen came up and did the little loading circle thingy, then it froze for... what felt like 10-15 seconds or so. It finally booted into the Windows login screen but veeeery sluggishly. Then suddenly it BSOD and gave me an error saying "kernel security check failed". It then rebooted again and this time no blue screen, however the system was slowed to an absolute crawl! It was really laggy, choppy and hiccupping like crazy. The mouse cursor was skipping/stuttering, moved very slowly despite the high DPI setting and there were also some screen artifacts on the desktop. (Kinda looked like when an LCD screen gets cracked) So at this point I figured a clean install of Windows was in order since I recently upgraded my motherboard from a B450 to the aforementioned B550 and never did a clean install of the OS. So I figured maybe it was a conflicting driver issue from the old mobo?? 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, I reinstalled Windows. I installed all latest Windows updates and all the necessary drivers etc- all that good stuff. (I even had to spend $15 on another stupid Windows key 😒) All seemed fine and well until I woke the PC back up from sleep later on in the day. Black screen, no video signal. The PC then rebooted itself and hung on a black screen for a bit. Finally when the signal came back it showed the TUF splash screen and the loading circle slowed and hung again. My heart sank! "NOOOO! NOT AGAIN!! 😭😭" Windows login screen comes up and here we go again with the slow/sluggish/choppy unresponsiveness! It also did those weird screen artifacts again! So I rebooted the PC until it ran normally. (Yes, it only seemed to work when it felt like it after a few reboots) then I ran sfc /scannow and it found and repaired some files. However the issue still persisted after another reboot. I also ran Memtest86 for 4 passes, didn't find any errors.

So now I'm thinking, "what if it's the new BIOS being screwy??" So I downloaded BIOS version 3202 and flashed it. After it was done, I rebooted the system a few times. Around the 2nd or 3rd time, the issue came up again. Loading circle hung, booted into potato PC mode. So I downloaded BIOS version 3002 and flashed the BIOS AGAIN! 😅 Rebooted the system a few more times, and once again, around the 2nd or 3rd boot, like clockwork. The system hung and went into potato mode. However this time I got another BSOD. "video scheduler internal error" So I'm like..."Is it the new graphics card???"

I then decided to run DDU and uninstalled the graphics driver in safe mode. Now here is the interesting thing...the issue seemed to completely vanish when no graphics driver was installed. 🤔 I rebooted the system about 7 times in a row or so without a graphics driver installed and it DID NOT happen again. So I narrowed it down to my graphics card. It either had to be a driver issue, a hardware issue, or possibly a BIOS issue. Maybe something in the BIOS isn't playing nice with something in Windows, or perhaps in Nvidia's driver software? Who the hell knows! 🤷‍♂️

So I reinstalled the graphics driver to see if that was the culprit and what do ya know, here we go again! After the 3rd reboot- *fart noise*

So at this point I thought I'd try to reinstall my 3070 and see if the issue was still present with my old GPU. Worst case scenario I'll just return the 4070. Only after I pulled the 4070 out of the case, I held it and thought..."what if I just tried to reseat it? 🤔" So I did...

Powered the system up again, no issue. Reboot, no issue. Another reboot, no issue. Another reboot, no issue! Another reboot, NO ISSUE! YET ANOTHER REBOOT, NO ISS- you get the idea!

So long story short, after all of that, reseating the graphics card seemingly fixed the issue. I'm thinking perhaps maybe when I fixed that clip on the CPU fan, I may have jostled the graphics card or the 8-pin power connector or something. Is that possible?

Anyway, with all of that being said...I'm a little worried that by doing all those BIOS flashes, is it possible that could break something later on down the road? I left it at BIOS version 3002 and since everything seems to be working now I DO NOT want to mess with it! Like, AT ALL! I've been waking it from sleep mode and using it regularly these passed few days and it seems stable so I dunno. All I'm asking here is, do I have anything to worry about?

Sorry for this super TL;DR post. I made a post on Tom's Hardware regarding this issue a few days ago while I was having said issue but barely got any help. In fact the only replies I did get felt a bit jaded, halfcocked and slightly rude. I also tried Reddit and my post just pretty much got ignored. So if anyone can give me any feedback or advice that would be much appreciated. Thanks. 🙂
 
I can't promise everything will continue to work correctly but don't worry about the bios, if you want to update it again at some point go ahead.
 
Can't speculate on down the road, can only go on if it works fine now go ahead and play! I am thinking it is probably fine. Ive done similar crap with memory before, unstable system, random freezes and bsods. Power down and push on ram stick and hear a "click" and work fine after that.

Welcome to the forum btw!
 
Could have had a short from the wire to your gpu, which was removed when you reseated the GPU. Or it could've been the gpu wasn't seated well and lost a connection when it was bumped. 🤷‍♂️

If it's working I say let it roll. Don't bump your PC. 😉
 
Can't speculate on down the road, can only go on if it works fine now go ahead and play! I am thinking it is probably fine. Ive done similar crap with memory before, unstable system, random freezes and bsods. Power down and push on ram stick and hear a "click" and work fine after that.

Welcome to the forum btw!
Yeah the funny thing is I thought it was the RAM at first so I ran memtest86 and it didn't come up with anything. It wasn't until I got that video scheduler blue screen that made me realize it had to be GPU related.

Thanks man, glad to be here! 🙂
 
Could have had a short from the wire to your gpu, which was removed when you reseated the GPU. Or it could've been the gpu wasn't seated well and lost a connection when it was bumped. 🤷‍♂️

If it's working I say let it roll. Don't bump your PC. 😉
Yeah that's what I'm thinking. Weird how something that small could cause such a major problem. 😆

What sucks now is it's still fresh in my mind so it's got me paranoid every time I use my PC. Even though I haven't had any further issue since I reseated the GPU; minor or catastrophic. I keep having those "what if" thoughts in the back of my head when I wake the PC from sleep or when I'm playing a game or something. Really annoying. I'm also hella scared to even dust it out with my air duster now. 😬

However at the same time, it could be somewhat of a blessing in disguise. Since I was too lazy to reinstall the OS after swapping mobos I noticed a lot of my games ran poorly, suffered from micro stutters and such. Now that I'm running a fresh install my games run a lot smoother! 😅
 
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