Man, I am tearing my head out with this one and have an entire new system with a 9800X3d, 64GB of DDR5 6000 and an ASUS TUF Gaming 870 Plus sitting in my shopping cart but from what I have read there is a good chance I can swap everything and end up in the exact same boat... 

I had the opportunity to swap my 4090 for a 5090 for  $800 with the Newegg trade in program.  Figured as I am going to end up in '24 with great vram demands anyway that I would go for it. 

Currently I have a Corsair modular 1000W PSU

Gigabyte Aorus Z790

64GB DDR4

4x M.2 

5090 RTX 

 

The issue is the system will only boot once every 20 or 30 tries!  Never had an issue with the 4090.  What's strange is sometimes it will go to boot then go straight to power saving, sometimes it will go straight to a BIOS message about failed boot with multiple options but my mouse/keyboard are dead despite Fast Boot Disabled and I can't actually do anything other than hard power cycle.  Sometimes it will go back to the back screen loop and then without any changes miraculously it will boot, all my BIOS settings are back to normal and the system runs great.  

The issue is the black screen on boot and reading up on this it appears to be a widespread issue with lots of suggested fixes.  

I'm already using the adapter cable which some people recommend.  Do the 4090 and 5090 use the same adapter?  I guess I could try my 4090 adapter instead. 

I've disabled Fast Boot but still have to manually change my PCIE from 5.0 to 4.0 which some people also suggest. 

I've reseated all of the cables in the system

I've reset BIOS to defaults, upgraded BIOS, multiple NVidia drivers and once the system is running I can restart it without issues. 

It's only from a cold boot that I would say there is a 99% chance will end in a black screen until I just keep trying for 20 minutes and it eventually boots....

 

Like I said, I have an entire new system, motherboard, CPU, RAM, I could swap the PSU and M.2's with the 5090 so the whole build would be less then $1000 for a killer system but my concern is going through a full new system build and ending up in the same place... 

 

Any HW experts here have any suggestions?   

 

 

i am not a 5090 owner, but based on your specs and power on symptoms, i think you may need at 1200w or slightly higher PSU to give it a trial and error shot.

Just now, avistudent said:

i am not a 5090 owner, but based on your specs and power on symptoms, i think you may need at 1200w or slightly higher PSU to give it a trial and error shot.

Could be, other than recabling everything that's not a tough swap but what gets me is that it does always "eventually" boot and run fine after just sitting here and resetting it time after time... 

Could be many thiings.

1. pw 1kw is fine;

2. reseat the gpu, make sure it is thight. Take a look with a flashlight;

3. use DDU to re-install drivers;

4. which brand gpu?

Good luck

 

Yeah, it shouldn't need to do that.  Under normal operation, once power on, if all specs are good and running altogther with stable current/power, it should just on and stays on.

If restarts happens, it is either the power how interrupted due to high overclock settings (insufficient power) or MAY BE some component incompatibility (like RAM)....I am assuming you have a clean OS to being with?

But if you have been using your existing hardware with 4090 without issues, then it may be the PSU

18 minutes ago, ppo said:

Could be many thiings.

1. pw 1kw is fine;

2. reseat the gpu, make sure it is thight. Take a look with a flashlight;

3. use DDU to re-install drivers;

4. which brand gpu?

Good luck

 

Will do...  I also just noticed that my MOBO has 4 LED indicator lights to help me diagnose where the issue is while it's posting.  I'm mid flight now but will tear it down again after this flight.  That's the frustrating thing, when it works it works fine!

It's the ZOTAC Gaming SOLID GeForce RTX 5090

Have you checked the GPU mfr's site to see if there is a firmware update for the card?  

15 minutes ago, flyinion said:

Have you checked the GPU mfr's site to see if there is a firmware update for the card?  

Shame on me but I have not!  Good suggestion thank you!!  

Edit, no firmware but they do have their own utility, I am desperate enough to try anything at this point

So I have a green light on the GPU indicating a solid 12VHPWR connection so the issue isn't power to the GPU.  I need to pay careful attention to the indicator LED's to see where it is failing, CPU, GPU, VRAM or POST.  The Motherboard indicators "should" tell me...  "Still" mid flight with no issues what-so-ever doing LHBP-KEWR flying home from the F1 race 🙂 

Outside of that considering I have so many re-usable components what are everyone's thoughts on going from the 12700K with DDR4 to the 9800X3d with DDR5?  It would be same storage, same PSU, same GPU, same cooling so the total cost is just under $1,000.  I've been an Intel guy since like 1996 so going back to AMD would be a big swing and a big learning curve

Thoughts?  

 

Edited August 5, 2025Aug 5 by psolk

😁

 

3 hours ago, psolk said:

Shame on me but I have not!  Good suggestion thank you!!  

Edit, no firmware but they do have their own utility, I am desperate enough to try anything at this point

It's hard to tell but it sounds like it's failing to boot before it even tries to load windows?  Or does it always make it past the BIOS screen?  If it always makes it past and it's just Windows is failing to boot up, I would look into creating a bootable USB stick with Memtest86 first and let that run 4 passes to sanity check your RAM.  If that's good, open or install if it's not then open the management software for whatever brand your boot drive is (Samsung, WD, etc) and make sure it's not reporting any disk errors like you have a failing drive.  If all that passes, run SFC and DISM per this Microsoft article (I've had the original bookmarked for years before they migrated it to their new "Microsoft Learn" platform recently) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4377105/(article)-sfc-scannow and see if there is some windows corruption causing issues.

 

edit: I would run memtest regardless of where it's hanging actually.

Edited August 5, 2025Aug 5 by flyinion

9 minutes ago, flyinion said:

It's hard to tell but it sounds like it's failing to boot before it even tries to load windows?  Or does it always make it past the BIOS screen?  If it always makes it past and it's just Windows is failing to boot up, I would look into creating a bootable USB stick with Memtest86 first and let that run 4 passes to sanity check your RAM.  If that's good, open or install if it's not then open the management software for whatever brand your boot drive is (Samsung, WD, etc) and make sure it's not reporting any disk errors like you have a failing drive.  If all that passes, run SFC and DISM per this Microsoft article (I've had the original bookmarked for years before they migrated it to their new "Microsoft Learn" platform recently) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/4377105/(article)-sfc-scannow and see if there is some windows corruption causing issues.

 

edit: I would run memtest regardless of where it's hanging actually.

Not even getting to Windows...  I hear the fans spin up, see the LED's come on then the fans go to low and the monitor days No Display and goes into Power Savings.  It's like it never even gets to the boot process.  But then randomly it will work fine and I am 8+ hours into my current flight.  I also dual boot and it never even gets to the boot selection or bios selection screen.  

I also can't use mouse or keyboard but like I said I have fast boot disable so USB should be available pre OS load... 

Will do a memcheck just in case but also really interested to see which LED lights up on the board when it fails... 

Appreciate the help! 

47 minutes ago, psolk said:

Not even getting to Windows...  I hear the fans spin up, see the LED's come on then the fans go to low and the monitor days No Display and goes into Power Savings.  It's like it never even gets to the boot process.  But then randomly it will work fine and I am 8+ hours into my current flight.  I also dual boot and it never even gets to the boot selection or bios selection screen.  

I also can't use mouse or keyboard but like I said I have fast boot disable so USB should be available pre OS load... 

Will do a memcheck just in case but also really interested to see which LED lights up on the board when it fails... 

Appreciate the help! 

Question, what CPU are you running, and if Intel 13/14th gen, how old was the BIOS you were on before updating it?  I'm wondering if this is a symptom of the 13/14th gen degredation from Intel's microcode allowing the chips to pull too much voltage for quite a while (was all over a bunch of tech youtube channels last year).  If this is what's going on, then doing your upgrade to the 9800 etc should actually fix the problem.  Unfortunately if it IS the degredation issue there's no fix other than a new CPU as it's a permanent hardware level degredation of the chip.

15 minutes ago, flyinion said:

Question, what CPU are you running, and if Intel 13/14th gen, how old was the BIOS you were on before updating it?  I'm wondering if this is a symptom of the 13/14th gen degredation from Intel's microcode allowing the chips to pull too much voltage for quite a while (was all over a bunch of tech youtube channels last year).  If this is what's going on, then doing your upgrade to the 9800 etc should actually fix the problem.  Unfortunately if it IS the degredation issue there's no fix other than a new CPU as it's a permanent hardware level degredation of the chip.

12th gen 12700K.  I tried to stay away from the 13/14 for that very reason!  Just completed 9 hours 16 minutes landing at KEWR with 120 AI loaded and without an issue.  So strange!  I'm almost tempted to see if I can just put the system to sleep and then restart it in the morning rather than shutting it all the way down...  

11 minutes ago, psolk said:

12th gen 12700K.  I tried to stay away from the 13/14 for that very reason!  Just completed 9 hours 16 minutes landing at KEWR with 120 AI loaded and without an issue.  So strange!  I'm almost tempted to see if I can just put the system to sleep and then restart it in the morning rather than shutting it all the way down...  

Ah ok.  My understanding was the issue of the bad microcode was actually going back to 12th or even maybe 11th gen (12th for sure), however supposedly the degredation issue was only affecting 13/14.  It could just be random aging/etc of components introducing an issue though.  I doubt it's the 5090 just because it's not really pulling power any more than a 4090 until you're in a game.  I think I'd check for what error LED is lighting first and go from there next time it happens.