Random Power offs

Keylow · 30 Jan 2007 at 20:21

Pc has been working fine, but the other day crashed in CSS and the nice woman built into the motherboard started blaring "SYSTEM FAILED CPU TEST" down the speakers. I rebooted and all was well. It then happened again a few days later during general web browsing. I rebooted and sent an error report to Microsoft. It came back saying something was wrong with the hard disk. I had heard strange noises from the drive but they have stopped since. Now currently the PC is losing power at totally random intervals and the only way to turn it back in is to yank out the power cord and plug it back in. When it does lose power the motherboard light stays green so it is still getting power somehow. It POSTs perfectly fine and while in use there are no problems (although I have been laying off games and stressing the system in general). Any ideas what it could be? My initial thoughts were HDD, but why would that account for the weird power failures? Possibly motherboard or the PSU. Is it worth checking the PSU rails to try and narrow it down a bit? I really have no idea what the rails are or what I should be looking for though, so I could post the results here. What's the best program for reading that? Specs are as follows:

Asus A8V deluxe Rev2
A64 3500+ (the 130nm one)
1Gb cheapy Hyundai RAM
HEC 385W PSU
6800GT
200GB Maxtor SATA drive

Whole system is about 2 1/2 years old.

Keylow · 31 Jan 2007 at 20:05

Was just playing Max Payne 1, the screen went blank and the SYSTEM FAILED CPU TEST starting blaring out again. Reset and is fine for the moment.

Limehouse · 31 Jan 2007 at 20:46

If it's a HDD problem, why would it say 'FAILED CPU TEST', isn't the whole idea of those things, to tell you what the problem is? They can be useless as at times.

Keylow · 31 Jan 2007 at 20:47

They are really useless. I just did a test. Every time I saved on max payne the HDD squeaked a bit. I then hit the quicksave key over and over and it powered off. Reckon its the HDD?