Looks like a motherboard issue. "what im saying is, more specifically; MSI USB initialization causes many issues for vast majority of MSI users on boot"
From priors at https://www.google.com/search?q=error+code+9C
You also have Seagates and then opted for RAID 1 which I've found to be problematic as the usual RAID 1 is unrecoverable if the boot drive fails. Be sure of your choices here. Some folk don't discover this until it fails.
Everything worked fine for about 4 weeks, lots of gaming, stable and low temps under load (low to mid 50s during heavy gaming). No overclocking (yet). Over the past week there were 1 or 2 times I thought I turned if off at night was running the next day Today I tried booting and got the bios splash screen but no boot into windows. I restarted, keyed into bios, changed an option, hit “save and restart” and it froze. I restarted and for the next Several boots I had blinking underscore cursor in upper left corner but no boot. Reset cmos chip, tried using 1 stick of ram in all of the slots, unplugged usb cables, get different results each time I power on. No longer get splash screen (except briefly for one boot after moving ram but couldn’t reproduce it). Getting different results each time. Seem to have lost all video out. Monitor never seems to come out of sleep mode. Now, I get the following results:
Stick on a temperature on the debug display (i.e. 35, 69, 10)
Code 00
Several times it would turn on for a few seconds, turn off, and then turn on again
Motherboard splash screen, then blank, error code 9C, then turns off
I don’t know if it sounds more like a motherboard or PSU problem or something else.
I’ll check the processor pins when I can get some thermal paste in the mail in a couple of days.
Any ideas of what is going on? Does it sound like a power supply issue or the motherboard? Can I rule out the processor since it worked fine for a month? Next steps?
I’d love to figure out which part is causing me the trouble so I can return/RMA new one.
Thanks!
MSI-Z97 Gaming 5
Intel Core i7-4790K w/ Corsair h100i GTX liquid cooler
MSI GTX 980 Ti
2 X 8 Gig Corsair Vengence Pro series
Corsair RM 850W 80+ Gold CPU
Boot disc- Samsung 850 Evo-Series 500 GB SSD
2 X Seagate HDD 4TB (in Raid 1)
Win 10, 64 bit

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic