Newly built PC experiencing boot issues and slow Windows processes

Kline

I put together a new system last week and it's been giving me trouble every day since I completed it. Apologies if this is lengthy, I'm really stumped on what to do and would greatly appreciate some help.

When I first got it running successfully, everything seemed fine for several hours. I had been playing COD when I got a Steam error and had to restart the game. As soon as I closed the game, multiple programs stopped responding (Steam, Task Manager, Windows being overall slow) so I tried a restart thinking it might fix it. It got stuck on the "Restarting..." screen for several minutes, and I decided to force it off by holding the power button. When I turned it back on, it got stuck and showed nothing but a black screen, with the yellow-green boot light lit up on the motherboard.

To fix this, I powered down completely, took my NVME out and put it back in, and made sure some wires were snug. I powered back up and it came on, showing me the default "Press F1 to run setup" screen. I went through the BIOS and restarted, didn't change anything, and Windows booted up again like normal. Ok great, that solved that issue. I shut it down later when I was finished with it, and didn't have any more problems that night.

The next time I turned it on, it showed the black screen and boot light again. I did the same thing as last time to fix this, but this time I decided to switch my NVME to a different slot. When I turned it back on after that, the orange DRAM light was stuck lit up on the motherboard. I took the RAM sticks out and put them back in, and then it worked fine again.

Last night, I was trying to shut it down through the start menu, but nothing happened when I clicked shut down or restart. I tried to put it in sleep mode, and that worked, but it woke back up on its own so I tried again, only for it to suddenly shut down completely. When I powered back on, it was back to the black screen and boot light. After this, I discovered that I could simply cycle the power switch on the back of the PSU for it to boot back up to the F1 setup screen, instead of going through the trouble of replacing the NVME/RAM each time. Almost as if the motherboard needed a power cycle to fix the problem.

Every time this boot issue happened, it booted very slowly when I got it working again. It would take 15-30 seconds after initially powering on the PC for it to finally boot to Windows. My old PC with less powerful parts loaded much faster than this. Based on my experience with it so far, it seems like after I've been using it for a little while it starts to bug out and act weird, and then I end up needing to cycle the PSU to get it to boot again.

Does anyone know what could be causing this and know any possible fixes?

Thank you!

Specs:

CPU: i7-13700K 3.4 GHz

MB: Asus ROG Strix B760-A Gaming WIFI LGA1700

RAM: Corsair Vengeance (2x 16GB) DDR5-6000 CL36

GPU: Gigabyte RTX 4090 Gaming OC

PSU: Corsair RM1000e

Storage: (2x) Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB (transferred from my previous PC)

OS: Windows 11 Home

PowerSpec_MikeW

@Kline

Sounds like some type of warm boot issue. Lets cover a few things to dig in further. You said it's slow to boot, watch the LED's when this is happening. One thing about DDR5 is that when it retrains, it's much slower than DDR4 generally. You'll see it sitting on the yellow/orange DRAM LED. If that's what's slowing the boot, that's pretty normal.

Now for your issue, it's mostly with the boot LED. This tends to cover storage/USB devices. So either it can't read your main drive, or it's hanging up on something. If you have anything connected via USB besides the keyboard/mouse, disconnect it. The extra drive from the old PC, I'd pull that as well for troubleshooting and try to replicate the issue. Drive does seem to be a likely root cause when considered with the initial issue, but it could be something weird rather than a hardware issue. As an example, software installed directly to the second drive that's being routinely accessed.