PC constantly turns off after 1 second after using power meter

DragonQ

DragonQ

DragonQ

Soldato
Joined
13 Jun 2009
Posts
6,872
My PC was working fine. Then I came home, unplugged it from the wall, plugged it into a socket power meter and back into the wall. I tried booting it and it turned itself off after 1 second. I removed the power meter from the wall and plugged the PC back into the wall directly. No change.

I've unplugged all hard drives, the GPU, all but one RAM stick and still no dice. The CPU fans spin up so it's not that it's shutting down to protect the CPU from overheating. I am very confused as to what has happened and how. I'm down to either the motherboard or PSU being dead but am unsure how to figure out why. I can swap in a PSU from another machine but they're all newer, low-power machines so I don't even know if they have the grunt for an X58 board and CPU.

Has anyone experienced this before? Any reason to think it's more likely to be the motherboard or PSU? Any ideas how exactly using a power meter (which I have done before) could cause such behaviour?
 
Power switch on your case ok?

If for some reason its getting stuck "on" it will turn the pc off again since its a momentary switch and normally works by briefly connecting the power jumpers.
 
Nah, the same thing happened when using the motherboard's on-board power switch. I tried a different PSU with just the CPU and RAM and it worked fine. I then put the original PSU back in and it worked. At this point I was confused. I plugged everything back in (GPU, USB devices, etc.) and tried again. Nope, power turned off within a second. I then unplugged everything again leaving just the CPU + RAM + GPU. Worked fine. I then plugged a keyboard and monitor in....and nothing. The power seems fine but I have no monitor output and the keyboard has no power.

Not sure where to go from here. I'm not even entirely sure what's broken.
 
Tried the GPU in another PC, worked fine. Tried a different PSU with just the following powered on: Motherboard, CPU, RAM, GPU. Again, no power to the keyboard and no GPU output. So I guess either the motherboard or CPU are fried. Wish I hadn't sold my i7-920 recently...
 
Ha, just when I thought I'd tried everything. I was running with one stick of RAM during all this testing and even tried two different RAM sticks. What I hadn't tried until just now is using a different RAM slot. The PC now appears to be fine, despite the fact that I'll have to drop to 16 GiB! I have no idea what killed the first RAM slot but I won't be using that power meter again that's for sure.
 
I'd say it was coincidence. Either that or it was able to affect the power going from 240v AC through the PSU to the regulated DC motherboard voltages and then to the RAM.

Bizzare if it did though :eek:
 
Just had a quick read of the (annoyingly secured and thus not copyable) user manual and it says that the system won't boot with a single DIMM in slot A2, so that explains why it wouldn't boot when I was testing with a single RAM stick.

What it doesn't explain is why the PC now (hopefully) works fine with the same components as before, after experiencing the issues I described. A power surge that dissipated or something?
 
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