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Alright Gerbils, I'm stumped. I've got an office machine I built a little over 3 years consisting of a GIGABYTE GA-Z77M-D3H-MVP LGA 1155 Intel Z77 motherboard with an i3-3220 running in an Antec 300 case that ran without a hitch for its entire life until about a month ago. At that time it started locking up and restarting unexpectedly. After it was done crashing and generally misbehaving it now won't even post - it simply spins the PSU and CPU fan for a few seconds before stopping and staring the fans over again and again. Every once in a while I will catch a glimpse of the Boot splash screen but nothing more.

I suspected initially it was the OCZ ssd I was running in it and intended to swap in a samsung drive I had, restore the Windows install and get on with life. Well, in the course of a very frustrating morning I ended up using the OCZ in a generic Sandy-bridge era Dell I had spare and it's been working without issue since. So, eliminate the SSD as the culprit. The next most likely candidate was the PSU.

The machine sat as it was for a couple of weeks until I got around to pulling a know-good PSU from another spare I had laying around and when I finally got around do making the change it's acting the same as it was before. At this time i've also swapped out the memory, tried one stick in each of the slots (individually), unplugged everything but the main PSU and processor power connectors, Reset the BIOS. Nothing seems to work.

I'm suspicious of the BIOS - it's a Gigabyte board with their Dual BIOS and it almost seems like it's trying to boot one BIOS, not liking it, trying the other, and repeat ad nauseum. Does anyone have experience with this kind of issue?

I hesitant to throw money at the problem if its something simple - it's still a relatively decent machine so it's worth putting some cash into. The only other Ivy-bridge machine I've got around the office is my daily driver and I'd rather not tear that down to test the processor and board individually but I will if no one has any better ideas. I would guess the motherboard before the processor if I had to pick one.

TL;DR - anyone have experience with Gigabyte BIOSes getting caught in a loop?

I've never seen a CPU fail, ever. So yeah, that probably leaves the motherboard as the culprit.

Have you tried pulling, and perhaps replacing, the CMOS battery? I've seen systems flake out, and eventually stop POSTing entirely all because that battery was dying.

I didn't try replacing the battery - I pulled it in an attempt to reset the bios but maybe with the dual bios having a weak battery might be causing strange behavior. Thanks for the suggestion I'll try it out next week.

No luck with the battery swap. I caved and ordered a mobo off amazon - hopefully that's the end of it - if not I'll post back here and beg for more help

I had a ye'olde Gigabyte mobo boot loop because the chipset (northbridge or southbridge, can't remember) heatsink had dislodged. The heatsink hadn't physically fallen off, just lost good contact, so it was very difficult to spot and a small miracle that I even noticed it. Once I'd re-seated the heatsink, everything worked just fine.

Just something quick and cheap to try...

Welp - the new motherboard fixed what ailed it - in the grand scheme of things it's not bad to get an ivy-bridge machine back up and running for a few more years for less than $100. I've got two other ivy-era machines between home and work so I'll probably put this board on a shelf in case I get around to trying to revive it. Until then I can close the book on this chapter. Thanks for the suggestions, guys (and/or gals)