OK, this post I'll keep brief and just highlight the main events...it may help someone with this problem, hopefully!
Last week I bought a 3900X to replace my 3600X, from AMZN, because of an $80 reduction in the pricing (down to $419). As you know, the 3900X comes standard with the Wraith Prism, a cooler with three separate LEDs onboard--the importance of which I'll get to below. (BTW, the Prism is far better than the Spire that came with the 3600X--much quieter and cools better, etc. I was surprised at the major difference!)
*Immediately upon installation, the system ran like a top for the remainder of the day--no troubles at all.
*However, the next morning at the initial cold-boot of the day (comp is on from ~9:00 am-11:00 pm, daily, including 2-4 hours of gaming daily), suddenly, first time ever, I got a black screen with large-font white text denoting an error condition described as being "unable to find a boot drive", basically. It's the exact message you'd see if your boot-drive partition suddenly failed! IE, it's something you don't want to see, ever. Subsequent three-finger salute reboots and/or hardware resets brought up the very same error message and result.
*Making a long story much shorter, it turned out
not to have anything to do with the boot drive! Thankfully. After a lot of research/time spent, it seemed that whatever the cause, that
only on cold boots, the CMOS battery was being drained, and what was happening was that my system was
booting with the default bios settings instead of the ones I'd saved, because the saved bios settings were
dumped on cold boot--by the CMOS battery being discharged enough--during a cold boot--to cause that situation. My default bios settings called for
CSM Enabled to support a Win10
legacy-formatted Win10 installation, but my Win10 boot drive was
formatted and installed for UEFI, secure-boot, and with
CSM Disabled! Which explains the no-boot drive error message neatly.
*Solution: I started thinking about what was different between the 3900X Wraith Prism install and the former 3600X Wraith Spire installation. The one clear difference that might
possibly have affected the system electrically on cold boot was that the 3900X Wraith Prism cooler ships with all three LEDs on the cooler, the logo, the rim, and fan LEDs, turned ON by default. In order to turn them off you use the included USB connector, and download the appropriate control software from Cooler Master and run it to configure the cooler LEDs, which I hadn't bothered to do yet, of course, because I'd never had to solve a cold boot problem like this one!
After turning off all three LEDs on the cooler, it's been four days now with four cold boots running as expected and the problem has completely disappeared! System is booting just like it did in cold boots with the LED-less Wraith Spire and the 3600X! Strange and bizarre!...
I rank this one as probably the strangest problem I've run across--linking the CPU cooler to a
cold-boot failure problem has certainly not occurred to me before--except maybe in the odd case of a CPU cooler improperly forced on, etc. Although I am in no hurry to try it, I feel sure that if I tested my theory and turned the LEDs back on (I am not an LED person btw) that the cold boots would begin failing again, in the same way. Of course, warm boots, when the system always has time to recharge the battery to the extent required, present no problem with the LED's all ON.
I only wish I could have solved this one in the time it takes to read this post!...
(BTW, the 3900X is a fantastic CPU, imo! It's literally 2x as fast--sometimes a bit more--than what I saw with the 3600X--the linear performance improvement is very nice and it's real! If you are looking for a cpu that is only slightly slower in most situations than a 3950X, but costs ~half as much--(@ $418)--the 3900X is the ticket!)
