System won't turn on

[pepperbegs]

Hi,


My rig has a DFI Dark P965 motherboard, a Q6600 quad cpu (GO stepping), an OCZ GameStream 700 watt PSU, an ECS 8800GT video card, OCZ memory (2 1 gig sticks). XP home by the way.

It has been running well for over a year.

Last week while surfing it shut down (restarted). Now it won't turn on. (Dead).

I replaced the power supply with a spare. It booted once.

I don't think it is a heat problem. Coretemp said it was fine. When it booted the one time with the new power supply it looked fine.

Video card is in another rig working great.

How should I approach this ?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lalakai]

try the easy stuff first: remove and re-seat the ram and v-card. re-seat your power cables. check your cpu's cooling system; the cpu heats up so fast that if your cooler is down, your system can overheat in seconds.

i'm leaning toward a motherboard issue, and unfortunately, it's difficult to verify that, short of swapping it out. check to see if any lights come on (on the motherboard) when you power up. Several motherboards will have small indicator lights on them, to give you a basic status of the motherboard, ram and cpu. I had one system that refused to boot because of faulty ram module; indicator lights gave that pattern. If no indicator lights, look at where your net line connects into your computer; often there will be a small light that will indicate positive physical connect with the plug. You're not verifying that connection, but seeing whether power is routing through your motherboard; this is nearly a last grasp test.

hope something here helps.

grabbing at straws, reset your bios just incase something got into cmos. i don't like doing this unless i've exhausted all other options.

good luck

 

[mpilchfamily]

Also check the capacitors on the motherboard. See if any are buldging at the top. They should all be flat. If there are any that are buldging then you need to repalce the board.

 

[Lalakai]

sorry didn't post this earlier. as you are running 2 sticks of ram, it's possible that one of the sticks went bad. when you re-seat the ram, try leaving one out, then swap and leave the other out. see what difference that makes. happened to me and took me forever to consider that one of my ram sticks was bad.

 

[Jiggz]

Try going back to basic like mobo, a stick of ram, a video card and of course cpu. Boot it up and it should at least boot. If it doesn't then most likely you have a mobo or PSU problem.