Computer shutting off at boot

GisMO

Gawd
Joined
Apr 11, 2002
Messages
585
Hey guys i need help determining which part in my computer died on me.

My computer is not booting up at all, when i hit the power button, it shows the boot up screen (i have a evga motherboard, so it has a blue evga screen) then it shuts off. i then hit the power button again which causes the hard drive to run, but my monitor sits with no feed. At this point even if i do press the power button the computer doesn't respond. The computer has gotten progressively worse as before i would be able to go through bios then load up windows. Then at times, at the windows bootup screen system would shut down. and finally no matter what i do the computer just boots up and dies. during the times when the computer actually started up, system would check the floppy disk, but now it doesn't at all.

I'm thinking its a defective power supply, but it could also be the motherboard. Not really sure, how would i go about checking which part has crapped out on me?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

my specs:
opteron 144
evga nforce 4 sli
2 gb corsair plat-x twin
evga 7800 gt 256mb pci-e
1 120gb western digital p-ata HD
2 150gb maxtor sata HD
Audigy 2 zs plat w/ front panal
kingwin 450w psu ( 3 years old)
floppy drive
msi rage theatre 550 pro
some input accessories, usb hub, keyboard, mouse
 
when systems initially startup, is there a huge spike in power usage? because after the initial startup, i don't have any problems what-so-ever in running windows.
 
initial thoughts would also be PSU. Are you sure it's on the right voltage? There should be a switch on the back that can set the voltage to like 220 or 110, so make sure that's correct. My first build the guy i bought the case from set the PSU to the wrong setting and it would just cause strange things to happen (would boot sometimes, sometimes wouldn't...). It's also possible you're drawing off too much power, try disconnecting the hard drives and anything extra in there. Not sure if u're using 2 video cards but if you are take one of em out and see.
 
It will be hard to tell because even unplugging the two HDD's will only help a little. The cpu and Vcard use the most power.
 
Shmuckety said:
It will be hard to tell because even unplugging the two HDD's will only help a little. The cpu and Vcard use the most power.

yeah, but unplugging things my be just enough to get the PSU back under it's power ceiling. Since PSUs lose power as they get older, and age even faster when stressed to the max as this one may be, stability problems will start off scant and grow into "no boot situations" Even if it turns out not to be the PSU, I would definately look into get at least a 550w or 600w PSU for that build.

Ryan
 
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