Reseating the GPU actually worked

[SimicEngineer]

I've been having weird GPU-related stability issues with my PC recently, and when I turned it on this morning the system seemed to be booting normally but with no signal to the monitor. Full power cycle via the hard switch on the PSU; no dice. Swapped from DisplayPort to HDMI on a different monitor; still nothing. At this point I assumed that some marginal bit of silicon had finally bit the dust, and started looking at potential replacements.

Then I told myself that I really ought to do the standard troubleshooting thing and reseat the GPU in the PCIe slot "just in case", even though it had been in there for nearly 5 years. Somehow, that's apparently what brought it back.

So, yeah: this is just a reminder to not skip the basic troubleshooting steps, even (especially?) the stupid ones that can't possibly be the problem.

[Castyles]

Regarding faulty hardware, a friend of mine once said "It can be many things. Sometimes it's just dirt, though".

[metamec]

It's hard to believe it can be something so simple when you have done everything right and double and triple checked. In decades of building my own computers, I recently had my first poorly seated RAM moment. I convinced myself that the new RAM was bad, but nope!