Question PC restart loop after overclocking. CPU and DRAM red lights

Jul 18, 2021
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Hello everyone! Hope you are having a good day.

What I am about to describe happened yesterday for the first time on my 5 month old PC.

So, yesterday, I was gaming until this happened.

(For you to have more info, I overclock my Ryzen 5 5600x to 4.6ghz every few days with temps like 50-60 degrees celcius on CPU while gaming. As you see the temperatures are very normal. I only overclock while I am gaming and only on demanding games.)

So, as I was saying, yesterday, while I was gaming, I forgot to overclock my CPU. So I went ahead and increased my 3.7ghz CPU to 4.6ghz. I always overclock like this, I also undervolt my CPU. Basically, I've been doing this for months and it has never crashed before.

The thing is, there's something very very wrong about this crash...
So after the overclock and specifically, after I pressed "Save" , my computer crashed IMMEDIATELY.

I am like "Okay, the pc will just restart and I'll see what went wrong". I wasn't scared at all, because I thought it was an ordinary crash.
The thing is, there was no blue screen, the computer just shut down. On previous crashes there was always a blue screen.

So the PC restarts ( I reset the BIOS settings of course), and after the restart I get the blue screen which was probably reffering to the previous crash.

So it restarts again. After the restart, it restarts again and again. I'm like "Okay this is getting very very weird"

So the PC got me to the troubleshoot window but I chose to just restart again. And finally, I opened windows and logged in... for 15-20 seconds and my PC attempted to get into this loop of restarts again.

  1. The CPU and DRAM lights on my motherboard get red once the PC gets powered on.
  2. When the windows icon pops up the VGA and BOOT lights on my motherboard get red.
This is probably some important information.

I checked my CPU and my RAM.
I opened my PC case. The CPU is fine, no burn marks or anything. Besides, I didn't even get to overclock for half a second as my PC shut down immedeately after I pressed "Save" on the overclock settings.

The RAM was also not the problem, I tested putting out the RAM and changing their position etc.
Still the same thing with the lights.

The PSU gives power to every component ( I can see it in the BIOS menu that it powers up everything normally), so I don't think it's at fault. The PSU is 1 month old. Pretty new.

I don't know what to do.
I tried resetting CMOS by putting out the battery but it didn't work.

The red lights concern me but I literally checked the CPU and RAM and they are normal.

Once I enter my login password it immediately crashes.

I forgot to mention that I can open windows ONLY in Safe mode for some seconds but I can't open windows AT ALL anymore without safe mode. I only opened windows without safe mode once for like 10-15 seconds but never again.


Any ideas?
Should I reinstall Windows?
Maybe it's the driver's fault or something?

I can attach photos if you need.

Thanks for reading...!
 
Nice post, but those who can help you will need to know more than the CPU. If it's a pre-built, what make/model, if you built it, what parts?

Look here:
 
I suspect you have a corrupt Windows installation due to instability on your CPU or RAM. Reinstall Windows first.

If thats the case your overclock has been unstable at the settings youve been running. Its been slowly corrupting files without you seeing them until this happens, and it will happen again unless you confirm your overclock settings are stable by testing properly.

Used to be people would run Prime 95 blend test for 24 hours straight before using an overclock. Its probably not necessary for gaming, but think in those terms. Run a very stressful game, run some Asus Realbench, some Prime 95 small FFT's, some Hyper PI, some 3D mark etc etc on a loop like a few hours of each and youll probably be O.K for gaming.

Look up a proper overclocking guide for your chip and follow those steps.

Better even then all that, just enable PBO in Ryzen master and forget about it. You really arent getting much benefit more than what PBO will give you. On an all core overclock you might even be losing some performance as you may have some cores that would boost higher than 4.6 if you let it be.
 
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