Red Screen

Specs

I built this one in January of 2017

-- i7 6700K Skylake
-- Asus Z170 mainboard
-- 16 gigs o' RAM
-- EVGA 750w power supply
-- 500 GB Samsung SSD
-- 2TB Seagate mechanical
-- Asus GTX 1070 8GB
-- Win 10

Machine locked up last night after playing Elite Dangerous. Wouldn't post when I tried to reboot.

This morning it starts up but with a red screen. I can still see the BIOS info and that sort of thing, but it's a red background and the screen is like a static fuzz all over it.

Research points to video card or video driver, which of course is what I expected. Anyone have the same thing before?

Hows the best way to go about trying to fix it? Reboot in safe mode and try to re-install the video driver?

Have you got on-board video? You could whip out the 1070 and switch to that to see if the problem goes away.

I've never known a driver that could cause that sort of a problem. At the BIOS the driver won't even have loaded. I'm guessing it's the video card.

Not sure Chucky. Never used on board, if it does have it. Is it common on Z170s? Or is that down to manufacturer?

Just have a look and see if there is a video out on the I/O panel on the motherboard. Not much else I can add I'm afraid.

A quick online check showed that your CPU has Intel HD Graphics 530. The motherboard has the output ports for on-CPU graphics.

I don't own Intel, but it seems if you simply remove the GPU and use the video output port on the motherboard, it should boot up.

I do know on my AMD MBs, one can turn off the CPU graphics in BIOS, if on-CPU graphics exist. Can't say if your MB has on-CPU graphics disabled. But, I imagine they are not disabled.

Just speculations for what they are worth.

OK, thanks Allen and Chucky. I'll be home in two hours to try some stuff.

Worst case scenario. OK, maybe not worst case. But let's say I need a new card. What's the scoop these days?

I don't want to spend a ton of money. I don't want a big leap in power requirements. A little better performance is good, but everything I play runs like butta on the 1070 (or did)

Thinking of a 1660 Ti after cursory research. Opinions on the best mid-range card ($300 range) with say less than 200w draw?

Nevermind. It's worst case scenario. Won't post. Don't know what the culprit is. Main board. Hard drive. Something else.

And I have no inclination to figure it out at the moment. Down for the count.

If it won’t even POST that sounds like mobo or psu.As said, I would try plugging in onboard video in case its something specific that’s failed related to the card slot. The video card may be ok I would think, but no way to tell as it is at the moment.
There is a chance this is the psu, and in dying wasn’t providing enough power for the gpu, and now has totally died. I assume there are no signs of power at all?
1-try onboard video
2-got an old psu? any size will do, just leave on onboard video
That would at least narrow down the mobo or psu question.

I tried most things. Moving/swapping RAM. Re-plugging PSU leads to test for a dead leg. Remove 1070, try onboard. And more.

It powers up, fans spin, lights light. No beeps, no video signal.

Ah, I thought it wasn’t even powering at all.
Swap your hdmi cable. If no go...
Got another monitor? Going to one color can be the panel going out. If it now has nothing at all after that, it died completely.
If no monitor, try a tv that supports the same resolution.

No like I said it won't POST. Powers on but nothing else.

Monitor's good.

I suspect it is the main board. Could be hard drive.

I will probably build a new box, then fix this one and give it to my son.

When that happens is another matter entirely. I may just drop kick it in to the street and be done with it.

DBond if it's the card I had to replace mine in February. I went with this one https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487424. I paid less than this and have seen them 329.99. I'm pleased with it as I came from a 760 4 gig EVGA card.

That's a really good recommendation Wingy, thanks. You have a great card.

My solution to my issues was driven by the fact I don't want to spend much money. When I built the dead box in Jan '17 I went higher end.. Not cutting edge, but at the time the 1070 was right up there, and the Skylake was pretty recent as well. Of course, one pays a premium the closer to the top you go. My M.O. was always to research the cutting edge, then drop a level or two lol. Yesterdays best thing ya know. I felt like it was the way to get the best price/performance ratio.

So today I completely threw that out the window and ordered the parts I need for a budget box

I would have loved to go with a 2060, and I can always add one in the future. For this build it'll be a 1660 Ti. This card is marginally better than the 1070 (which by the way may NOT be dead) The upshot is I should see similar or slightly better graphics performance with a lower power draw.

In order to keep the price down I skimped on basically everything. I plan to use this one until I get around to tearing down the Red Dead Contraption. I'll then turn that in to an up to date box and give the budget one to my son, who is 9 and looking to become a PC gamer. The parts I am getting will enable me to more easily troubleshoot the dead one too.

The biggest leap of faith I made was on the mainboard and CPU. I haven't used AMD since an Athlon around 15 years ago. I've been Intel/nVidia ever since. This box will use a Ryzen 2600 and a MSI B450 main board. I even skimped on the power supply, which I never do and went with a Seasonic 500watt. Maybe the truth is that I always go overboard on power supplies. 500 should be plenty. Normally I'd go 750 for probably no good reason at all.

16 gigs of RAM, 500 GB SSD/2 TB mechanical, air cooled. SSDs are so cheap now.

If the Ryzen is more or less on par with the 6700K I'll be happy enough. It benches better anyway. This box will be good enough for everything I play now, but lacks future proofing. For the money I can live with it.

We have 4 Ryzen PCs in the house including R5-1600X -- the old version of your current 2600. They all play games very well -- and do everything else. Based on our 1600X gaming performance, your 2600 is plenty.

Heck, as a place holder in a PC I built just yesterday, I used a Ryzen 3-1200 4c/4t (the weakest one they make and out of date -- I use it for testing). Tried the R3-1200 in the Assassin's Creed Odyssey benchmark (all Ultra settings, 115% FOV) at 1440p (2K) with RX580 GPU (that I bought for ~$170). Gave low but playable FPS. Not recommending that Ryzen to anyone for anything other than Office PC or HTPC though.

Good to keep it cheap now as the new wave of 7nm CPUs and GPUs hits this summer. That will virtually (not literally) obsolete the current stuff. Next Black Friday may turn out to be a good time to buy (or not, we'll see).

Will be nice to read your opinion on how the build turned out.

I think it'll do just fine, the AMD CPU that is. I wasn't looking to go AMD when I began the process, but it started to look like the most attractive option. We will see, but I think I made the best choice for what I was looking to do.

I was in the dark concerning the main board having been away from AMD for so long. So I hope I picked a good one. I've always bought mobos with impressive features that I don't end up using, so here I went with a more barebones one. It's a MSI B450-A PRO. Less than $100 for the board.

Edit: 2600 comes with Wraith Stealth, not Prism, so will be looking for another cooler.

The power supply is Seasonic. They get great reviews. Ram kit is Corsair DDR4 3000. Middle of the road but won't hold back the CPU and I can bump it anyway.

Graphics card is MSI GTX1660 Ti Ventus XS. Just seemed to fit what I was trying to do. I'm losing 2 GB of VRAM from the 1070, but the faster memory and much better bandwidth should make up for it. Plus it draws less power and probably runs cooler too. The 1660 Ti seems to be great bang for the buck. Turing architecture with a few features missing (ray tracing, tensor cores).

My expectations are that I will have a new box that's a little better in most respects than my dead one. I'll certainly give my impressions once it's up and running.

Build is done and went well. Pretty straightforward.

I put the stock cooler on, but the plan is to bump the Ryzen to 3.8 or 3.9 Ghz, and this cooler (Stealth) isn't going to cut it. Or I won't take the chance anyway.

BIOS defaults to smart fan settings, which is super quiet at idle. But that's just about 800 RPM. I turned that off and the CPU fan runs at 1900+ RPM. This dropped idle temps from 38C to 33C @ 23C ambient room temp.

Performance is zippy enough. My benchmarking days are long behind me. Boot time is 15 seconds, but all new builds boot fast. The only game I installed so far is Elite Dangerous and it runs as well as before. Maybe better, but if so I can't tell.

Two things jumped out at me in Elite. One is I see more detail. This could be down to settings, though I think it's set up the same. Things like the galaxy map are more crisp and detailed. Target ships show more detail, especially lighting. Again, perhaps down to a setting, but could be the 1660 Ti.

The other thing is sound. I've been using on-board sound for 20 years now. Sound quality is markedly superior to my dead box which used an Asus Z170 board.

The only trouble I am running in to is after installing Elite with no issues to the mechanical storage drive, I now get a Steam disk write error when trying to install a second game. Could be a Steam issue, could be a drive issue. Tried a few standard fixes but nothing is working. It's a Barracuda, I know, but I got a good deal on it.

Aside from that problem, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Total cost was about US$900. Build took me 3 hours and it booted first try.

Glad to read it went well. I imagine the 1660 Ti is doing its part

FWIW, I set our Ryzen 5 1600X, Ryzen 5 2400G, Ryzen 7 1800X to 4GHz in BIOS (good cooling). So all 4GHz cores all the time -- no boost above that.

I'm not recommending it at all. In fact, I set the 1600X back to stock after a year of intermittent use at 4GHz -- because I don't want a failure on that particular machine. This is just information FWIW.

The 1660 Ti was a great choice I think. For the games I play I have little need for ray tracing quite frankly so don't miss it. The card is considerably smaller than my 1070, looks to have superior image quality, is at least as fast and draws a lot less power. Good all around. For the money this card is really hard to beat in this market.

For anyone looking to pick one up be aware that all 1660 Ti's come with 6 GB of GDDR6. Non-Ti cards can have as little as 3 GB of GDDR5. Big difference!

Thanks for the info. I plan to overclock this chip. I think I can do it with a $20 cooler like a Coolermax 3000 or the Hyper 212. Should have bought that already. I edited it out in one of the above posts, but I mistakenly thought I was getting the Wraith Prism. Only after I ordered it did I discover the Stealth is bundled with non-X 2600s.

AMD's got their game together these days

I seem to have fixed the Steam disk write error by ticking the run as administrator box.

In the end I didn't go with the Corsair RAM as I said earlier. That got backordered, so I switched it to Kingston Fury Hyper X.

I had a recent memory issue with the Ryzen 3 1200 build. One brand failed to be recognized by W10 -- only recognized 8GB of 16GB (although the hardware and a benchmark app said it was there). Tried "everything" -- fail. Finally, tried a different brand -- worked instantly and easily OC to 3200MHz with just a click in BIOS (the speed it was advertised to give). Wound up using this (got on sale -- sale only 6 more hours).

Memory that Worked as Advertised

Also, on memory, I found the 1600 and 1800 actually run measurably faster with memory clocked up to 2933MHz. Articles said that would happen -- those CPUs actually need fast memory to work their best (most AMD CPUs in the past didn't respond much to memory speed). Over 2933GHz makes no difference on my systems. Don't know if it applies to the 2600 and 2700 series because they are different (and faster) inside.

2933 is what it is. These sticks have auto overclock, but I haven't messed around with that yet. The plan was to run it at 3200, but I want to be sure everything's stable and good to go first. It's running great so far, really happy with this new box. It's fast, cool and quiet, all the stuff I hope to see.

A postscript to this build. AMD bundled a copy of The Division 2 with the CPU. Most stuff I've gotten in a hardware bundle is usually ignored or forgotten, but the Division 2 looks to be a really good game and is just released as well. AMD's redemption system sucks, and if I didn't actually want to play the game I would have just flipped them the bird and been done with it. There has to be a better way.

I won't go in to all of the details, just wanted to voice my displeasure. Just as an example, they force you to wait 24 hours to get your game after registering if you don't give them your mobile number. I'm sure they spent that 24 hours confirming my identity in a myriad of other ways. They also require you to download and run a hardware verifier, which has the most suspect of file names. Like mash all the keys on your keyboard for 45 seconds and that's the name of the file they want you to download. I still did it. I wanted the game dammit.

Yup, I've gotten 3 free AMD games recently -- and, though its easy if I press all the right keys in all the right ways, I don't manage to do it for a couple tries.

Once done, one does get their money's worth -- oops they're free. What I mean is they are good recently released games