Intermittent POST Problems (bad overclocking/voltage warning)

avrc

avrc

avrc

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I built this system in December and as of Monday when I turn the pc on I'm having intermittent problems.

Before it even POSTS's on screen, I get a series of very fast continuous beeps. My motherboard manual (GA-P55-USB3) indicates this as a power error however from googling it seems it's not always the case.

When this happens sometimes the pc will restart on it's own, other times I have to push reset. The fail safe BIOS settings then load and I can get into the BIOS where I'm greeted with a red box that says something along the lines of failure to POST due to bad overclocking or voltage settings. Currently the system is at stock with the voltages on auto. If I leave everything as it is and just F10 to save then it restarts fine. I can also restart the pc from windows without the problem reoccurring. It just seems to be from the initial time I turn the pc on. As I say this is intermittent, I turned the pc on this morning and no problem at all.

It's run fine since the end of December until this week. I've double checked all the connectors and that everything is still seated securely. I've had the side off and been watching while booting and all the fans spin up ok. I ran 10 passes of memtest before this started happening just to be sure the memory was ok and it passed but I'm doing another test today just to be sure.

The only thing I can think is that my PSU might be failing? It's a 750w PC Power and Cooling that was bought in May 2009 and has a 5 year warranty on it.

What do people reckon?
 
Theyre quality PSUs (using one myself) so it shouldnt be failing inside of 2 years, though theres always the odd rogue one

Im unsure from your post if youre saying you only have problems when OCing, or if its from cold boot irrespective of if its at stock or OCd?

If its only when OCing then the likely culprit is the 8 pin CPU connector, I know you said you checked connections but if its only OCing that causes power issues and not stock then this is the thing to dbl and triple check, alternatively try upping each of your voltages a notch or two
 
memory passed 10 passes of memtest again so I think I can rule that out.

New symptom tonight though! Turned it on, POST'd fine but before Windows started to load it suddenly stopped and then rebooted.

I'm going to try the OCZ PSU out of my sons pc tomorrow and see what happens.
 
Update:

Loaded optimised settings and that seems to have stopped the power error, not sure why as voltages are still on auto. However it's still now intermittently restarting before windows loads. I notice when this is about to happen there's a very fast line that moves across the screen under the words loading windows (black screen before the windows logo).

Swapped the PSU for the OCZ one and it still does it.

Oddly when I swapped the PSU the system would only recognise one of my memory sticks. I put this down to the OCZ only having a 4 pin power connector so not providing enough power but after putting my PSU back in it would still only recognise one. I've had to take the memory out and put it back in and then it was recognised again.

Starting the pc again just has resulted with no errors and a clean boot into windows. Not sure what will happen on the next boot.

Another interesting thing is that my PC has NEVER beeped on startup until I loaded the optimised settings, now it does?
 
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Got worse today. Randomly stopped detecting second stick of RAM again, loads of boot problems and then just now it froze on the desktop with one long beep and I had to reset. I tried resetting the CMOS earlier in the day but it made no difference.

Working on the basis it's the motherboard and started the RMA process with Gigabyte.
 
Another update.

After the long beep yesterday only one stick of memory was being detected so I tried each DIMM in the 2 slots (DDR3_1 and DDR3_3) and found that one stick no longer works and gives the power error beep code.

I've removed the offending stick and I've done 4 cold boots and a couple of warm restarts so far today and there's been no problems.

So it looks like I've had a stick die on me. I don't seem to be having much look with memory. I currently have another set of the same memory with Corsair RMA as one stick of that failed memtest.
 
Final update. PC has been fine since taking that stick out. Corsair are sending me replacement memory for the last lot I RMA'd so I'll RMA this set when that gets here.

Looking around the net there seems to be a fair few people having problems with CMX4GX3M2A1600C9 (2x 2GB XMS3 DDR3 1600MHz).
 
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