Black Screen crash (saga)

[alexit3]

It's been so long since I've posted here that I had to make a new account

Alright, so I've been through hell for the past week. For the past two weeks I started to run into a problem where XP would restart during the 'blue bar' boot phase, to the point where it would only get all the way every 10 times I turned it on and then not at all. It had been a while since I looked in the case, and I wasn't surprised when I saw about 10 capacitors just about totally blown, corroded stuff on top. Board was a VIA P4PB. So I ordered a new one, Soyo P4VTE.

But another problem showed up. After 5-10 minutes of running, the screen would go dead, fans would keep running. Sounded like a power problem, so I replaced my no-name 350w PSU with an Antec 500w. I also:
-replaced IDE cables,
-chkdsked the hard drive twice and found no bad sectors/file system errors
-disconnected everything except for vid card and main hard drive.
-checked for BIOS update but all that is avalible is to support high end prescott (i'm on a northwood and don't have a floppy drive to flash anyway)
-ran each stick of memory separately
-blew dust out and looked for case shorts
-cleared CMOS jumper (it was a new board, but I did it anyway)
-4-in-1 chipset and video drivers

Still happening, screen goes to black. Only thing I can think of at this point is maybe some heat probs - the video card is a little hot, but I've felt cards that are stable at higher temps. Bad ram is possible, but it's Corsair XMS and I've never driven the ram any higher than the rated power.

Here's my specs:
P4 1.8A northwood
Soyo P4VTE mobo
Radeon 9700 Pro
Corsair XMS PC2700 and PC3000, each 512MB
antec basiq 500w, also tried a second 350w PSU
seagate 120gb 7200rpm HDD

Any suggestions of where to go from here? (aside from the obvious get a new comp ) thanks!

 

[bob4432]

do you get any error or does the screen just go black? like black with text or completely black? also, did you take out each ram stick and run memtest on it to see if they were ok? does the bios update offer anything else besides prescott support?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Grab a flash light and check for bad caps on the mobo. Also, it sounds like you know what you are doing, but try taking the mobo out of the case, and doing a test run like that. You said that you didn't have a floppy drive, but do you have an optical drive connected? Have you sleeved any of the wires or anything, and possibly swapped one (seen that one time--guy swapped his floppy cables, and the machine wouldn't power up).

Just throwing out some ideas. What HS are you using on the processor, and do you have new TIM applied?

 

[alexit3]

It is a screen dead crash, as in the led starts blinking on the monitor, no error or anything. The two things that I've seen cause this crash before are heat and power, but I think I've addressed both of them.

I'm using a stock p4 HSF, cleaned it along with the chip and put new thermal compound on. It's locked on pretty solid, and stays pretty cool.

Currently no optical drives connected. I tried testing the board when it wasn't connected to the case.

Starting memtests now - another weird issue that points to the RAM - the sticks work by themselves on this new mobo, but not together, even when I manuallly set DRAM timing to CPU+0 or 33. Is this because of a PC2700/PC3000 mismatch? They worked fine on the via board. This board's chipset is a via pt800.

Thanks for the help

 

[alexit3]

So I ran memtest+ a bunch. Each stick works great individually, 4+ hrs with zero errors, but together I get hundreds in the first minute. I guess it's RMA time?