Dead PC :(

cats_five

cats_five

cats_five

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Joined
29 Dec 2004
Posts
420
Location
Fife, Scotland
My PC has died. I get nothing at all on the screen when I turn it on. I've taken the CMOS battery out while I got rid of the Miss Haversham stuff inside, and reseated the RAM. Didn't want to touch the CPU as I don't have any thermal paste to hand but despite the cobwebs it's been running cool enough. No thunderstorms last night either.

I get the impression something has suddenly died, but what?

The on-board VGA? The CPU? All the RAM? With no BIOS display it's something fairly fundamental. The screen is looking for the DVI input, thought that would be a very silly reason to commit Retail Therapy.

Motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-MA78G-DSH3, processor is a quad-core Phenom, RAM is 4GB of Corsaid. HDD is a Spinpoint, it has two ODDs as well.

Have tried with no peripherals except the monitor - no joy - and with the monitor and a PS/2 mouse. Didn't disconnect the HDDs.
 
cats_five said:
All fans are running (PSU, CPU, ventilation), no beeps but I don't think it has the wherewithall to beep.
Click to expand...

I had something similar early this year. Eventually found out it was a corrupted bios. Luckily the mobo I have had a backup bios chip so swapped them out.
 
The motherboard has DualBios and is meant to go to the backup bios if the main one is corrupt. I took the battery out for some time to try to make it reset the CMOS.

This is a PC that has been working for a couple of years, so of course all the bits in it used to work with each other.

The LED on the front panel came on, and the switch on the front panel is clearly working - I press it, all fans start spinning.

Maybe it's down to digging around with the multimeter, and if that looks OK doing yet more disconnecting...

I've remembered I have a spare VGA card through, will try that first just in case the on-board graphics are the problem.
 
To add:

I have tried a VGA cable instead of the DVI one with both the on-board and extra graphics card to no avail.

I have tried with no memory in, again to no avail.

So I need to find the multimeter which is in the boot, and it's raining right now...
 
Have now checked the monitor using the laptop and it's fine. It's good to rule that out as it's an Eizo - very good, and certainly not cheap.

I was thinking about recasing the PC anyway, will order the case & PSU today and take it from there. *if* the mobo is the problem I'll probably get a basic one to keep me going - I don't need anything fancy, I don't overclock (!) and I don't need fancy graphics. I suspect I'll be switching to SandyBridge at some point, but that's an extra £200+ for mobo, CPU & RAM.
 
quick test... let it turn on and fans spin, wait 30 seconds and then press the caps lock key on your keyboard. does the little caps light up? easy test to see if it is system or output to the screen...
 
Bizarre - today it sprung into life, *after* it's new case and PSU had been ordered!

All I can think of is that it was cold overnight, and it was very slow to boot last winter. I didn't have to wait long for obvious action, yesterday I could sit and watch and the fans would slowly spin.
 
I do, as I have no idea what really was wrong. However I have a sneaky feeling it's the PSU. And the supplier I ordered from were happy to cancel the express delivery when I rung them, so it could be worse! :D
 
Most of the time it's fine and it's lovely and sparkly clean (almost) inside now. Think it's quieter as well which I imagine will be because some of the Miss Haversham stuff was on the fans.

But the new case & PSU will leave me well-placed to go for Sandy Bridge or possibly Ivy Bridge sometime next year.
 
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