Gigabyte Z270N-Wifi and Windows 10 Pro shutdown problem

July 1, 2018

Lately I've been having a problem with my computer shutting down after I first turn it on. It seems to start, but as soon as the windows  comes up, the computer shuts down. If I turn it on again, then it comes right up and the system stays on without any problem.  So I decided to check the basic things as usual. I took it apart, cleaned the systems, took out the memory, tried another psu, changed the thermal paste since it's been a year. Not that I needed to do this, but I thought I do it while I was in there. The system unfortunately it's still doing the same thing. Hmmm. I posted on the gigabyte support and they reminded me about testing it with another psu so I did use my regular psu but still had no luck. They also suggested downgrading the bios which I thought maybe that will work as I was starting to suspect the bios since that's the only major thing I have done to it. Unfortunately it's still doing the same thing, but I forgot to apply the defaults just to be sure so I'll go do that right now.

I did the above but the issue persists. So downgrading the bios one lower didn't help either. I know it's not a thermal issue because the temps have been stable no matter what I do and the system doesn't shut down while it's on. So I keep on hacking at this.

I noticed my power button was being pushed back a bit since I'm using my 3D printed case, so I thought, maybe it's getting stuck or it may be failing. So I pushed it back to the front and put some hot glue on it to stay in place. I also decided to test with a new spare power button while on the f5 firmware and sure enough, the problem persists. Hmm. So far I think I have looked at everything from re-sitting the hard drive to each of the components. I don't have another memory dimm so I still went ahead and moved it to the other slot just for the fun of it. Still the problem persists. I have just about ran out of things to unplug or move and change. Aside from trying a new cpu but I know things are working fine since they have been fine for about a year I think. I was about to just go back to the newest bios and leave it at that, but then it hit me. I went down to the f5 bios, lets just see what happens if I go back farther back, to f4. I think I only had the very first bios on this motherboard when I bought it and and just updated it to the latest one. Well what do you know. My system seems to be working fine again on the older bios. It's been a pita but I have never had so much trouble with a bios before. Although I'm not surprised as there have been many changes due to those cpu issues that have surfaced lately. I don't know if this will happen with the later cpu versions, but this is what happened with my current setup.

I'm adding some pictures and videos of this here whole issue here.

Here is the bios reset when I tried to turn the computer on once with the fd6 bios which is the latest one as of this writing. Yes, the bios actually reset itself. I didn't even try to do this. So if you have a computer resetting, this could also be the problem. Which is your catch 22. You want the latest bios to prevent any malware problems with the cpu, but then the bios update is causing a reboot.

Unfortunately the battery on this motherboard is not on one of those battery holders that you can easily take out the battery and change it. Although it's not impossible to do here if you get one with the leads, but if you just have the batteries like I do, that may not be possible.

I plugged my old desktop psu to make sure it wasn't my pico psu, but no. the shutting down problem persisted with this newer bios.

Here's my power button. It actually gets pushed back a bit, but it was nothing a drop or two of hot glue couldn't fix. I'll need to go back into my design and see how I can improve the holding tabs for these.

Here's the button on the other side. Not as far back since it's the reset button which I hardly even use. But I still added a couple of drops of hot glue for now since I was in here anyway.

Battery check. This was a bit harder to do on this board due to the way it comes.

Shutting down. The video froze for a bit, but came back right before the shutdown happened so I did get this on it.

Here's the long video of me replacing the cpu thermal paste while I was in here.

Update: July 3, 2018
I may have spoken too soon. After the downgrade yesterday, the computer was turned on and off a bunch of times and everything was fine. I went ahead and turn it on today and what do you know, the issue is still here with the f4 bios. So at this moment this is just one of those problems that seems to be lurking somewhere but I can't tell where after going through the computer. I don't have another cpu or extra memory dimm to try out if it is the hardware. I have a pretty good feeling it's software but I just don't know at this point. I'll keep checking, but if it was the cpu, then it would shutdown after it's been running for some time not when it's cold and just the first boot of the day. The memory would throw errors or crashes, but I have none of those either. There have been quite a few windows updates though.

Update: July 7, 2018
I decided to change the hard drive to my linux drive. Basically I can remove the drives on my desktop and use whatever I want, so I thought I do the swap to see if I would still get this shutdown problem. What do you know, my linux drive works just fine and doesn't have the initial shutdown problem. Everything is working fine. So I can only narrow this issue down to two things, the Bios or Windows 10. Both have had a number of updates and I only have that problem with I use the windows hard drive. I have kept both of those updated so at this point it's hard to say which is at fault. But since I had been using the same hardware for a while now without any problem and it still works fine under linux, it could be a bios problem more than windows. This is not to say windows  may not be doing something funky here either.  So there you have it, until these get fixed, there just nothing else I can do.