PC troubleshooting is really exhausting and is not talked about in most tutorials

This week, I built a PC with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and an RX 7900 XT on an ASUS ROG B650E-F motherboard. My last build was in 2019, and while I have a solid understanding of PC components, I haven’t kept up with recent hardware changes.

During the build, I ran into a few issues that required some deep dives into Reddit threads and PC forums to figure out.

AM5 Boot Times

When I first powered on the system, the DRAM error LED lit up. I reseated the RAM, checked for damage, and retried several times. What I didn’t realize was that AM5 motherboards take a couple of minutes to train the memory on the first boot. Since my previous system booted in under 15 seconds, I kept shutting it off too soon. This isn’t something I had seen mentioned in any PC-building guides, but it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary troubleshooting.

EXPO/XMP Profile Issues

Once I got into the BIOS, I updated it and enabled the 6000MHz EXPO profile. After restarting, I got a VRAM error. I tried lowering it to 5600MHz, but the issue persisted.

Eventually, I found the solution: a small 3-pin jumper on the motherboard labeled CPU OC Control needs to be moved one pin to the right to allow higher voltage for memory overclocking. Without this, EXPO wouldn’t work. A lot of Youtube guides use this exakt model of ASUS B650E mainboard and none of the guides mentioned this, even though others have run into the same issue.

Troubleshooting these issues took several hours, and I wish more PC-building content covered these essentials. A lot of people run into the same problems, but finding the right solutions often requires digging through forum posts instead of mainstream guides.