A RYZEN 9 MASTERPIECE?

AT THIS STAGE, you’re probably thinking that this build went pretty smoothly. Well, we are here to tell you that it didn’t. Alright, we did resurrect it eventually, and the actual build went smoothly, but it wasn’t until we tried to boot it up that we were left scratching our heads. When we only received a measly half-turn of the fans, we realized that something was wrong, and what felt like a lifetime of troubleshooting occurred.

This isn’t our first rodeo, fortunately, so we went through the usual suspects of a failed-to-boot system. One of the first things we checked was if the cables were connected properly, so we looked at everything piece by piece, only to receive the same result. Next, we reseated the RAM, as this is a common failure point, but again this led nowhere. Our motherboard even had a dedicated power button, so we used this in case our power switch cable or header was faulty. You guessed it, this also led nowhere.

We assumed at this point that it was something to do with a potential overheating problem, as the system seemed to boot but then quickly turn itself off to prevent damage. Luckily, we had a spare stock AMD cooler to try out. This meant removing the NZXT CPU pump header, cleaning and repasting the CPU, and placing the stock bracket back on the board. With this on, we got a slightly longer boot, but the same old ending. For your information, all of these procedures were spaced apart by at least 10-minute intervals of pure confusion. It was a long day, but hey, it’s all part of the process!

After this, we kept the stock cooler in and tried to run our system without the Corsair controller connected. We thought that maybe we were using too much power, as by default these fans will run at full throttle without BIOS or software tuning. By some sort of miracle, it booted up for slightly longer. Then we tried to boot it up with the Corsair Commander reconnected with another SATA cable, and it did boot. The issue was a faulty SATA cable. This was confirmed when we reinstalled the NZXT Kraken X73 cooler and the system booted. For us, it was a simple mistake of picking up an older SATA cable instead of the new one—they got bundled together. Don’t underestimate the power of organizing your workstation.

We got there in the end, but not fully. Frustratingly, our bottom fans didn’t light up, but did spin. We knew this was a simple fix by downloading the Corsair iCUE software, which we did, and this resolved the issue after the build.

Our main issue is the GPU PSU cables. We’re missing one, so moving forward we will replace the PSU with one that has more PCIe ports. An extra fan here along the front would have looked cleaner and filled the space more effectively. More fans, you ask? Yes, we reply. An additional RGB exhaust fan here wouldn’t make for a bad addition to the system. Another set of the same kit would have finished this build off nicely and looked even better on the motherboard. 1 2 3 1 4 2 3 4