A custom water loop gaming rig that wouldn't boot..

[Kshipper]

I had a custom water loop rig come into the shop that wouldn't boot. It had an I9-10900k CPU with an RTX 2080 (both water-cooled). I would see a BIOS POST screen but only briefly then it would shut off and reboot endlessly. At first, I thought this has to be a RAM problem. It had some nice GSkill RAM (that shiny gold stuff) in there but it also had some low-end Patriot value RAM in there too. I thought for sure that was the problem. Nope. Fooling around with the RAM made no difference. I found 2 drives on the backside of the case. A Samsung EVO SSD and a spinning HDD. I disconnected both but that made no difference.

I figured the next step was to drain the custom loop and get everything out of there. The customer didn't want to spend this much money on labor to figure out what was wrong and said "He was going to sell it for parts". Knowing that I decided it was worth a try to move the graphics card out of the main slot and try installing a simple GT 710 in the bottom slot. Maybe this was all the video card causing trouble? I was able to do that without draining the cooling system (just enough slack) but it didn't change anything. I even hooked up a different power supply. No change. It turned out that there was an NVMe M.2 SSD under the graphics card (really hard to get out with the graphics hovering above). It was the bad Adata NVME M.2 SSD causing all the trouble. =(