Stangest Problem I have Ever Seen

[Sahrin]

This one has me puzzled, and I'd appreciate any light you folks can shed on it.

Yesterday, my computer froze while I was attempting to unzip too many .rar archives at the same time (stupid work zips one pdf at a time into one archive...each pdf is one page...nice). So I manually shut down the machine, and reboot. I perform a cold start, (I do not have a speaker connected at this point) and the machine starts, and then stops. Turns off, dead. I attempt to restart again. Same result.

At this point, I am troubled. I start disconnecting peripherials, (and connect the case speaker) and I get a sustained boot, finally. When I do, I get a POST error (Long - short short short) (A8N32 SLI Deluxe - AMI BIOS - the only resource I found indicated this is a memory problem). I swap one stick out (2 x 1GB) and boot again. Boots normally, all the way to Windows. I get into Windows, and shut down, and then plug the second stick back in. This time, no POST error (for both sticks) so I start plugging peripherials back in like a happy camper. I connect the ethernet cable. And BAM. Shutdown. Instantaneous. I couldn't believe it, I assumed it was an electrical problem of some kind (bad ground, bad cable - this was a CAT5e cable, the nVidia MAC supports GbE - so I swapped the cable for a plain jane CAT5 to get 100BASE-TX). With the regular cable - same kind of problem, though decidedly less severe (doesn't kill the boot, but it freezes it). I try swapping MAC's (connected to the onboard Marvell port instead of the nVidia) and get the same style problems. Finally, I give up, and boot into Windows without ethernet connected at all. And success.

I connect ethernet cable (to nVidia MAC), and BAM. Shutdown. Again. From a stable desktop. I was mortified/mystified. Could not fathom how this was happening.

I start over again (the next day, as I am stressed by this error). And boot sucessfully into Windows. I connect the Ethernet cable again (100Mbps) and run the system fine...for about 30 minutes. Then it fails. And won't sucessfully boot (POSTs sucessfully, then shuts down for no reason). I disconnect the Ethernet cable again, and it boots sucessfully. This time, I connect to the Marvell MAC, and it is running stable as of now.

What would cause this? Is it some short/burned out circuit/component in the nVidia networking MAC? Is it (2 seperate) bad cables? Is it totally unrelated?

I greatly appreciate any help you can lend.

Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Asus A8N32 SLI-Deluxe
Powercolor X1900XT 512MB
Creative X-Fi Plat
2GB DDR-SDRAM (G-Skill; CL3.0)
620W PSU (Brand eludes me)
Samsung Burner
6 x HDD's of varying sizes

 

[sieistganzfett]

i think your mobo is the problem. your troubleshooting keeps bringing it back to things that point to the mobo, ram that is good says its bad and when you recheck it suddenly is good and works (would need to do a memtest to confirm mem is good or run it in another pc for that) BUT, connecting to either onboard Network port causes shutdown problems... the lockup you had when you were doing something intensive such as working with a bunch of rar files in the first place could also be related to the mobo, but your consistent onboard NIC issue i say is a telltale sign the mobo is the problem. (ya, your work is really stupid or crazy, doesn't it take more space or the same amount to rar a bunch of 1 page pdf files which then get compressed together in a rar, as it does if they just put all the pdf's in one rar?)