Distorted display after upgrading platform. What went wrong?
Hi everyone,
I recently purchased the MSI MAG MAG X870E TOMAHAWK WIFI AM5, opting to pair it with a Ryzen 5 9600X as well as two sticks of G.SKILL Flare X5 Series AMD EXPO that I scooped up around Black Friday. I'm coming off of a much older board, CPU & RAM.
In regards to actually putting everything together, all seemed to be going well. However, once I decided to try and boot, my monitor displayed a bunch of weird purple lines (image below, please excuse how dirty my monitor is**)** before eventually, it would go into the BIOS.
The BIOS screen, however, would be super distorted (image below). I know that it was loading into BIOS because I was able to F6 + F10 and could see a change through all of the distortion.
Between a few restarts here and there, clearing CMOS and whatnot, I was able to circumvent the display issues only a few times. Notably, the things that seemed to work were flashing BIOS and clearing CMOS. However, when I attempted to save & exit, it would go back to the purple lines & whatnot.
This is about the first time that I've attempted such a large upgrade, as I've changed out my graphics card (to a 3060), my storage device, as well as other people's RAM. I ended up rebuilding my old system, and it's operating just as it did before.
I'm unsure if I perhaps did something wrong, or if I should be worrying about hardware damage of some kind. Either way, any advice would be greatly appreciated. If any more information is needed, please let me know. Thanks!
TL;DR: Upgrading my relatively old & dated platform caused my display to bug out, and I was only able to see a clear display after updating BIOS & clearing CMOS
Posted Dec 8, 2025, 3:35 AM UTC