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May 24th, 2023 18:00
Aurora R15, will not boot
I bought a new Alienware Aurora R15 with 32g ram and Nvidia 4090 card. It worked fine for a couple of weeks, then refused to boot. The lights came on, there was full power to the unit, but nothing on the monitor. I tried all the resolution steps on the phone with Support (try a different monitor, try a different HDMI cable, unplug the unit and hold the power button down for 2 minutes, try to activate the boot menu, etc). NOTHING! Oddly enough, when I left the machine unplugged overnight, it started working again. After a couple of days, it stopped booting again. Once more, after leaving it unplugged overnight, it started working again.
Clearly, this is not a viable long-term solution, so I requested a replacement unit. Dell sent me the replacement, and it worked fine for a couple of weeks. Then, the same problem started to occur.
One other item of interest - when the machine is in this state and I manually power it off, it turns itself back on after a few seconds. ODD!
Dell is now sending me a third unit. I am hoping this one will work, but I am not counting on it at this point.
Does this problem sound familiar to anyone out there?
Livergreen
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May 25th, 2023 06:00
No, just plugged into regular power, no UPS. I am beginning to wonder if this is a flaw with the 4090 graphics card.
WCunningham1
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May 25th, 2023 06:00
Could it be related to power? Are you using a UPS? Just spitballing here.
ProfessorW00d
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May 25th, 2023 07:00
The same "flaw" in two consecutive RTX 4090 graphics cards would be statistically extremely unlikely. The common item to both computer failures is your electrical circuitry. Do you have a way to measure the output voltage/amps at your wall socket?
Vanadiel
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May 25th, 2023 08:00
Key item is it turns itself back on after you power it off.
That to me indicates it's either receiving a wake call, or the PSU has an issue. Considering you are experiencing the same issue after a replacement, I would lean towards the PSU.
A fault in your circuitry would not cause the PC to turn itself on after you shut it down. Unless you have set it to automatically turn back on after a power failure, but I don't think the motherboard used in the R15 has such an option listed in the BIOS.
ProfessorW00d
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May 25th, 2023 14:00
Much like the RTX 4090 graphics card . . . two consecutive power supplies with exactly the same 'flaw' exhibiting identical extremely uncharacteristic symptoms would be statistically improbable (but not impossible).
Vanadiel
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May 25th, 2023 15:00
There's a few other users who have reported issues with their systems booting up with a black screen and other strange behavior.
If I am not mistaken, the R15 uses the new 12 Volt standard and more importantly, uses multiple 12 volt rails instead of a single 12 volt rail.
So it could be related to the load the 4090 puts on the rails, or even an issue with the PSU design.
I am assuming this is the 1350 Watt PSU. That one has 3 rails:
I remember having a discussion with someone before about the ratings, because that's not a continuous rating as in when you add all that up it's well above 1350 watts at 1800 Watts.
So this PSU requires a balanced approach to how you load up each rail, or things will not go well.
It's one of the reasons why I hate multi rail PSU's and why they got away from them years ago. In the days of SLI and Xfire they made this big deal about selling PSU's with split rails for multi GPU configurations.. IT caused nothing but issues, so they went back to single rail PSU's...
Of course, that's all just my opinion and would require detailed analysis of the system to determine the exact cause, but it's something to think about.