PC mostly won't boot with codes 00 15 46

[t_than]

Hello,

I have the following setup:

• Motherboard  ROG Crosshair x670e hero
• AMD Ryzen 9 7950x
• G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64GB DDR5 (2x32GB) 640
• Gigabyte GeForce RTX 4700 Ti
• Corsair RM850x PSU

It has been running without any issues for almost 2 years now, until a couple of days ago. The PC shut down, and restarting shows codes 00 15 46 and just loops between them. If left for quite some time off, it may boot successfully, but only for a couple of minutes. I have

• Visually inspected the CPU for defects but didn't see any.
• Used the flashback button to upgrade to latest BIOS
• Used different memory (G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 2x16GB) and only one module
• Take the motherboard out its case to exclude any electrical shorts
• Changed the VDDIO/MC voltage to 1.2V, based on a suggestion here at this forum.

Nothing works, it will still boot occasionally only for a short amount of time. Please also take under account that whatever settings I was using, were giving me a stable system for a very long time up until this fault. I would kindly appreciate your help with this.

Best regards,
Thanos

[Silent_Scone]

Hi @t_than 

Two things stand out;

 You shouldn't need to deviate from the operating voltage when troubleshooting. This needs to be reverted to Optimised Defaults if you're still applying EXPO or any sort of memory / CPU overclock.

Can you confirm the behaviour is still present at Optimised Defaults following a Clear CMOS via the rear IO panel (No EXPO or overclocking of any kind)?

2. When the system does occasionally POST, you say only for a couple of minutes - what is the behaviour?

[t_than]

Hi @Silent_Scone,

I did clear CMOS and loaded Optimized Defaults at some point these last few days, but it wasn't fruitful. I tried to give it another shot just now, but for the time being the BIOS won't load so I can't view or change the settings, I'll try it again later in the day though.

When the system does POST, I would see no difference with any normal booting sequence, except of course the single warning that my PC didn't shut down properly and I should check my BIOS settings. Other than that it will boot my operating system correctly, but all of a sudden it will crash and go into the 00 15 46 loop and won't POST again.

I've taken a video of the seven-segment display in hope that it'll give some more information on the problem. Thank you for extending a helping hand.

[Silent_Scone]

What are you typically doing on the system when it crashes? It just reboots without any stop-code / BSOD? 

Have you inspected the 24-pin ATX and EPS12V power cables?

Any noticeable sag on the PSU rails when monitoring via HWiNFO?

[t_than]

First time that happened was during a game. Any other time it has managed to boot the OS, I wasn't able to do anything really before it crashed, maybe just open a Firefox window at most. Then it goes through the qcode loop (never POSTs) and doesn't stop looping until I power it off.

I hadn't checked the cables up until you mentioned it. I did it just now and the cables look okay.

Unfortunately, since I'm not able to enter BIOS or my operating system, I can't monitor any hardware info to share here.