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Is it the motherboard or power supply?

V

VidarJMD

Member
A couple weeks ago I started having problems with my machine. It would turn off randomly. Not completely turn off, the screen would go black but the power LED was still on and the fans kept spinning. I eventually stripped the whole thing down to motherboard, powersupply, videocard, ram, and harddrive and it would continue to do the same thing. At times it would never post. When I hit the power button, the fans would turn on along with the power LED but none of the lights for the cd drives would turn on (when I had them connected). I'd keep unplugging it and trying again. Sometimes it would post but go back to that state after a couple minutes.

ABIT BE6-II
PIII 700
GeForce DDR
256 SD RAM

I put the CPU in an IBM machine and it worked! In fact, I put the ram, cpu, and video card in another machine and it ran fine for a few days. So I narrowed it down to the motherboard or power supply. At times I would have other power supplies laying around and I'd test those but they still wouldn't get the machine up so I came to the conclusion it was the motherboard.

So I bought a new one. I plan on building an entirely new system this summer for college so I got a cheap Pentium3 MB to last until then. An ECS P6S5AT. It came a couple days ago so I tried putting my system back together. Everything was ok at first. XP didn't like so I installed Win98 and I only had a problem with my cable modem but then those other problems started happening again. Upon boot the system recognizes the CPU as a 466 instead of a 700 even though the settings never changed and sometimes the system will never initialize the video like with the previous motherboard.

I'm gonna try to buy a power supply tomorrow and test that. I don't know what else it could be. What do you guys think? I hope I didn't just kill two motherboards with a stupid power supply.

Thanks.
 
don't buy a generic psu if possible, they will give you problems, what other power supplies did you test on it? how many watts were they? does you motherboard have jumpers on the board, of do you set the frequency in bios? are you sure you set it up correctly? when you went to win 98 from xp did you do a fresh install?
 
I only had my 300W that came with my case to really test with. It says Power Comtec on it. I had another one in a system my Dad brought home for me to work on from his work but that was an older PentiumII system but it was ATX so I tried it and it didn't work. It was most likely 250W or less.

I've been setting everything through the menus in the bios. The first motherboard gave me much more flexibility but for the ECS I just set it to 100MHz FSB and 7.0 multiplier to get me the 700MHz of the chip. It reported it correcly for a few hours while I set Win98 up (which I did do from a fresh install after backing everything up using the machine I'm on now (a cheap emachine. See why I need mine back up quickly?).
 
After going to a local store and seeing how expensive power supplies were I ordered a recommended TigerPro 400W online. It just came today so I continued my troubleshooting. Here's what I found.

The ECS motherboard is doing the same thing. It gets stuck up at "Checking NVRAM..". I figure that could be video ram so I tried switching video cards and it went a step further with "Checking NVRAM..Check OK" but still hangs there. I tried resetting the CMOS and even took the battery out for a few minutes to make sure everything was reset.

The ABit motherboard runs every time from what I can tell but still goes blank after 10 seconds or so.

So again I ask, is it the motherboard or the powersupply that's the problem? It seems to me that with the ABit, it's the motherboard. I don't know about the ECS. Thanks for any insight.
 
Have you pulled everything else off the motherboard but the video, cpu, and memory and see if it goes any further. It could be a floppy or hard drive if you haven't tried swapping those. Try it at its most basic, if everything looks good then start adding a part at a time. Probably floppy drive first, then hard drive, then cdrom, then sound card.......etc. until the problem shows again.

For your sake, I hope it wasn't a bad supply that cooked two mobo's...........🙁

...................edit.....................
If the basic system doesn't boot right it might even be memory.
 
I'm having a very similar problem. Abit BE6-II and P3 700. Win2k locks up during boot at various stages. Can't boot in safe mode. Sometimes the monitor goes black when it freezes, sometimes it doesn't. Still have a few more things i can try, but I've narrowed it down to mobo, psu or cpu, because they're the only things I can't swap out. I'd like to know what the bad part is when you find out.
 
So it is possible for a power supply (that I've had almost 2 years mind you) to go on a rampage and fry any motherboard it is put in?

That's crap.


I had stripped everything down and I have tried other harddrives and ram but they don't effect the outcome. That's what lead me to believe it was the motherboard or power supply but then this happened.

The fact that this "NVRAM Update" step doesn't complete leads me to believe it could be the video card. Oh wait. I already did try other video cards...

The way I see it I've blown $100 in the past week only to be back where I started.

How am I supposed to start my mp3car project if I keep going like this? 😉
 
Unfortunately, if your getting something like AC ripple out on any of the rails then it could very well cook whatever mobo you plug it into........🙁
 


<< Unfortunately, if your getting something like AC ripple out on any of the rails then it could very well cook whatever mobo you plug it into........🙁 >>



If that's the case, I should just toss this PSU before it fries another mobo. Maybe just toss my mobo too before I lose more parts.
 
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