u/DragoniteSpam

I built this PC about a year ago (april 2025), and it worked fine until May when it stopped booting. I haven't been able to get it to post, and varying combinations of the CPU and DRAM status LEDs have turned on depending on what I do.

The system was completely fine for a year, up until a few days before this happened when I got a few blue screens in a row. More on the blue screen logs farther down, they might or might not be relevant.

Part list:

I realize the name on the saved part list is a bit tragic, given what we're here for.

• AMD Ryzen 9 9950X 4.3 GHz 16-Core Processor
• Thermalright Assassin X 120 Refined SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler
• ASRock B850M Pro-A WiFi Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard
• Patriot Viper Venom 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6400 CL32 Memory (it's not on the QVL but it worked for more than a year, albeit at 4800 MT/s)
• Crucial P3 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
• Sparkle GUARDIAN OC Arc B570 10 GB Video Card
• Zalman S2 ATX Mid Tower Case
• Super Flower LEADEX VII XG 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

What's been tried

The last two months have been kind of ridiculous but let's try to go over the whole thing from the beginning.

1. Removing everything except the hard drive, the CPU, and the memory
2. Installing multiple different, working hard drives (I didn't really expect this to fix a post issue, but for the sake of completeness I'll include it anyway)
3. Swapping around the memory modules
4. Installing the memory modules one at a time
5. Installing them in different channels
6. Re-flashing the bios on the motherboard
7. For each step 3 through 6, waiting a while after turning it on to see if DDR5 memory training was being slow for some reason
8. Removing the cmos battery to reset the bios
9. Calling ASRock on the phone for advice
10. RMAing the original motherboard
11. Repeat 3 through 7 on the new motherboard
12. Bringing the whole thing down to a local PC shop for diagnosis
13. The PC shop said it was a dead motherboard
14. Buying an Asus Tuf Gaming B650-Plus Wifi instead (Patriot isn't on this QVL either but I'm running out of options)
15. Repeat 3 through 7 on the Asus motherboard

The PC shop was very insistent that the CPU and RAM were working, but the customer experience there left a lot to be desired and I'm becoming suspicious that they either didn't know what they were doing, didn't actually test the things they said they tested, and/or just made up a story to get me out of their hair faster.

I'm trying to track down someone else I know in meatspace who has an AM5 system who would be willing to allow me to test different combinations of CPU and RAM to try to figure out what's actually dead, but that's so far been difficult, and in the meantime I figured I'd ask here.

I have a hard time believing that both RAM modules would have died at the same time, but I have a harder time believing that I ended up with three dead motherboards in a row, so I'm inclined to suspect the RAM is dead.

• On the ASRock board, both the CPU and DRAM status LEDs were lit. This is annoying, but maybe there's some specific kind of failure that was causing the board to think both parts had issues. (Or maybe both are actually dead! That would suck but it would be pretty in line with my luck in the last two months.)

• On the Asus board, only the DRAM status LED is on. Progress?

• Analysis of one of the blue screen dump files (three days before it stopped posting) indicated a memory error.

    FAULTY_HARDWARE_CORRUPTED_PAGE (12b)
    This BugCheck indicates that a single bit error was found in this page.  This is a hardware memory error.
  

• The other dump file (one day before it stopped posting) gave me a generic SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (7e) which I suppose could be a downstream effect of the same memory error, but it could also be Windows being Windows.

Additional details

• Like a week after I finished the initial build in April of 2025, I became aware of reports of ASRock motherboards eating Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, so that wasn't great. This doesn't appear to have happened to me though, as all of the pictures I could find of affected CPUs show unmistakable scorch marks, and mine looks mostly normal except for a very faint (I assume) heat marks that are only visible under very precise lighting conditions. Under normal viewing conditions it looks normal. This technically doesn't prove there's not something else wrong with it, but it's probably not the ASRock socket burn.

• The original reason I'm using non-qualified memory is because my original board was an MSI B650 something, which it is officially supported on. That board was DOA so I replaced it with the ASRock one which worked for a year. Clearly, luck has not been on my side with these components.

• Is it possible that using a brand of RAM that's not on a board's QVL could eventually cause the modules to fail outright? The consensus on the internet seems to be that if you do that it's a dice roll if you'll be able to run it at full speed, especially if you enable XMP, which I never did. All of the computers I've owned in the past have had much slower ram speeds and I'm fine with 4800 MT/s as long as it turns on.

• All of the parts in here should still be under warranty as they're still all pretty new, but I'd like to be able to prove which component is causing the problem before exercising any more RMAs.

• I think that covers everything so far. I'll update this thread if I'm able to find someone willing to let me test the CPU and existing ram modules.