Knackered PSU?

Bar

Bar

Bar

Soldato
Joined
9 Apr 2004
Posts
2,702
So far I am over £500 down, 2 motherboards, 2 sets of ram and 2 processors and about to commit murder.

Bought a bundle from here:

MD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 920 2.8GHz
Asus M3N-HT Deluxe HDMI nForce 780a SLi DDR2 Mobo
Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB)Bundle.

Numerous problems when fitting it into my existing PC - looks like the motherboard was overheating. This is about to be returned via RMA.

Purchased another mobo just to be sure - plus I am impatient.

Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H 790GX Socket AM2+

The problems are basically the system keeps on locking up. With the Asus it locked within 30-60 seconds even when looking at BIOS.

I managed to get half way through installing VISTA 64 with the new mobo but it too has locked up.

The symptons on both boards have been very similar after lock up. When trying to reboot the pc needs left alone for a long time (circa 3 hours) before it will do anything again. When I switch it on the fans will spin up and that was it on the old board. On the new board I get continuous beeps which means power issues.

PSU I have is a Zalman 500W modular heat pipe one and I have not had any issues with it.

I also have a 9800GTX but when using the new mobo I have only ever used the onboard gfx so the Zalman should be more than enough. I have tried all combinations of RAM / CPUs / Harddrives, onboard gfx, pic-e gfx and I just cant get it to stay up.

Please help me transform my PC from a council estate chav to a convent girl.
 
Can I first ask how many systems have you built in the past, I don't want to be rude but need to know what Level to aim my answers at. :)
 
Built approximately 10 systems over the last 10 years.

Some from scratch others upgrades.

Not been keeping up to date with technology as much as I should have and I am much stronger in hardware that software.

Hope that helps.
 
Bar said:
The symptons on both boards have been very similar after lock up. When trying to reboot the pc needs left alone for a long time (circa 3 hours) before it will do anything again.
Click to expand...
Instead of waiting after lock up open PC and take off power cables from components and try starting PSU by shorting green wire to black from motherboard's cable.
(if you have fan you can connect to Molex use that for seeing does PSU really start)


Bar said:
looks like the motherboard was overheating
Click to expand...
Nvidia's SLI chipsets are power hungry and hot running.
 
When I say it does nothing what I mean is that the fans will all spin up but it will not post.

It is doing something though. If I take the RAM out before restarting and then start it it will beep.

Just wont output a video signal either via the main graphics card or the onboard.
 
3hrs... that's much longer than it takes for the MB to cool down. I would try running the board out of the case as there may be short (checked the upstands?) and if you can try a substitute PSU that would eliminate that from the list of possibles.
 
Apologies lads,

It looks like I have been an idiot. I am running some stability tests but it appears that I have either a dodgy stick of ram (one of the new corsairs) or a dodgy memory slot on the mobo.

Thinking back I had assumed that the new memory pair would be fine and never tested them independently.

Now got vista 64 bit up and running with the 9800gtx. Lets see if it works.
 
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