Motherboard not POSTING
I had a new customer recently (a 30 year commercial air line pilot), who brought me a computer they had built for running Microsoft Flight Simulator. This system was not booting. When you turned on the computer, fans would spin, but nothing else would happen, including a blank screen on the monitor. This system has an modern AMD Ryzen 9 processor, paired with an X570 motherboard from MSI. I knew from past experience with these newer AMD systems, that the motherboards can have trouble with the BIOS, if it is not current. I jumped the two pins that reset the BIOS on the motherboard with a flat head screwdriver, and powered up the computer. Sure enough, the computer began booting normally, and went to the Windows desktop! The BIOS version on the customer’s motherboard was dated from early 2020. I checked with MSI on the model of board, and the customer’s BIOS was behind by 9 versions! The latest version was from 2022 (at the time of writing this blog post), so I downloaded, and then flashed the BIOS to the latest version. Now the customer’s computer is running very stable, and performing like it should. I checked to make sure the customer had the latest Windows 10 installation and updates, and some other minor software updates, including Samsung Magician for their NVME Samsung drives. I also checked to make sure all of the customer’s hardware was installed properly in the case, which it was. The customer did great for being a first time builder. The only changes I made was to ensure the computer case fans were hooked up to the motherboard and not the fan hub on the Fractal Design computer case they used for the build. Finally, I removed the vertical graphics card bracket, and mounted the graphics card back in the normal position on the motherboard. The card was sitting to close to the glass side panel of the computer case, which can starve it of proper airflow for cooling.