Random power off !!!

jmarchel

Junior Member
May 31, 2005
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I built a PC couple of months ago using MSI K8N Neo4 Platinium mobo with 3200+ Athlon 64. Until recently it was working OK, but suddenly started developing random shutdown (complete instant power off). In most cases it shuts down during booting when the system is cold before even windows has time to load. Sometimes it shuts down immediately after the power button is pressed on (fraction of the second), even before anything has a chance to post, certainly before even hard drives are recognized. (This alone makes me think, that it is strictly hardware issue). When it manages to boot (which generally happens on the second or third attempt after failure), system remains stable for hours without any issues. Only once it did shut down on me when I switched on the power on the USB attached printer after it was already running for hour or so but I did not succeed to repeat this failure again.

The boot failure - shut down frequency is increasing also. Two weeks ago it was rare; probably I even missed some of the first ones. Now it happens almost every second or third boot with often multiple failures during single attempt to bring up the system until finally system boots and then remains OK for hours!!!

The event viewer reports nothing, there are no hardware conflicts, I did not install anything new in hardware or software. I did not upgrade BIOS or anything similar recently. The system is not overclocked and it's temperatures as reported by hardware monitor are excellent between 30 - 40 degreees Celsius after many hours of running.

I did all the "obvious" things including resetting CPU, memory and video card, resetting all cables that I could think of, but this did not helped.

Since it was looking like a faulty power supply, I did replace it yesterday with a brand new one. As you can guess, this did not help either.

What to do next?

I'm thinking faulty mobo, but this is getting expensive guesswork. Any ideas?

Jack
 

montag451

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2004
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What psu are you using?

My bet is its a cheapie you got with the case.
First troubleshoot - try a branded/reliable psu.

TAGAN / Enermax / Antec / OCZ etc
 

jmarchel

Junior Member
May 31, 2005
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Nope, that's not it.

Originally it was 420 W brand new Enermax EG425P and now I replaced it with brand new Antec SP 450. I generally stay with brand names exactly not to have this random problems that are so hard to investigate.

Jack
 

montag451

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2004
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OOOPS sorry -
Just sounds like a power issue.
Can you try another outlet in the house that is on a different circuit. Might have bad wiring.
Unrelated -
Can you also do a memtest to test your RAM while you are at it. Run it overnite - one stick at a time.
Don't suppose you have access to an online UPS do you?
 

jmarchel

Junior Member
May 31, 2005
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Thanks for advice.

I will certainly try different outlet when I'm back home tonight.

Regarding memory test, I'm running two sticks in dual channel setup (Corsair 2 x 512 MB DDR 400). Does it make sense therefore to test it separately or should I rather test it exactly in this dual channel setup ?

Jack
 

montag451

Diamond Member
Dec 17, 2004
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No harm in testing them both at the same time then.
If it throws up an error, then you'll have to test them seperately as single channel