A friend has a problem...

[Alter-Fox]

Hey all.
I have a friend who has a problem with a gaming computer build from the last few months. I have even less experience with this stuff than he does but I thought one of you guys might know something. He was kind enough to give me a detailed description of his build and what's happening for me to put here:

Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler
MSI H170A PC Mate ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Kingston FURY 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
Kingston SSDNow V300 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
EVGA GeForce GTX 950 2GB Superclocked+ ACX 2.0 Video Card
Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case
Corsair CSM 550W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
Cooler Master R4-S2S-124K-GP 44.7 CFM 120mm Fans
HP 22cwa 21.5" 60Hz Monitor

I just finished my first build about a month ago, and it was working great until I started experiencing intermittent connection problems with my keyboard, and then a black screen on startup, with the VGA debug light on my motherboard lit. The first time this happened I cleaned out the graphics card slot with compressed air and reseated the card, which fixed the problem. For about a week, when the exact same thing occurred. This time I was not even able to run on integrated graphics. After a trip to a local computer shop I was able to run again, until I tried gaming on it, which caused the exact same errors. The guys at the shop aren't sure what's causing the problem- though they did say it might be a problem with the card settings. Or maybe the actual card. Or the card drivers. Or the motherboard. So that doesn't narrow it down much. Any ideas? The games that have seen to have caused trouble were Subnautica, and then Bad Company 2. Both seemed to have less graphical quality than I had seen while playing Splinter Cell Blacklist previously- on that game I was easily running 60fps on high quality.

Thanks for helping guys, even though this isn't for me -- it's the kind of computer I still wish I could afford, working or not.

[Krom]

Only way to find out for sure is to swap components with a PC that is in good working order and see if one of them does the same thing in that PC.

The people in the shop saying it might be "the card" sound like they don't know what they are talking about and are just winging it. Yes, a bad video card can produce some of those symptoms, but a disconnecting keyboard would be a hell of a detour. Usually a bad video card will result in graphical corruption and games crashing to desktop from the nvidia driver resetting. Only in extreme cases would you get straight up blue screens / system hard locks and finally failure to display/post entirely. You already pretty much ruled the video card out as a cause because the system wouldn't work even with only the integrated graphics present.

I would check against a known good PSU, try the keyboard/monitor/video card/etc one at a time in a different computer and if they all check out then RMA the motherboard. The RAM and CPU could also cause it, but usually they would be causing regular blue screens, and it is difficult to test them without having a spare motherboard, so that is where I would go first if everything else checks out.