• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

new everything... except power supply

W

westikle

n00b
Joined
Dec 10, 2009
Messages
8
hi i'm wes, new to the forums.

i have purchased a new motherboard, ram, cpu, hard drive, and upon firing it for the first time i have instant problems. after immense research and troubleshooting i believe the culprit to be the power supply. (hoping anyway) the computer won't boot, but everytime i try it makes different progress. sometimes i get to the bios setup screen and it freezes. sometimes i get a black screen (it is getting vga signal tho.) sometimes i get a black screen with a flashing cursor. either way i can never get it to hang with me long enough to get the new mb setup. the fan also quit spinning on the back of the power supply while the front one will still spin. i checked all the voltages with a multimeter and everything checks out ok except for the blue wire which should be -12v is around -10.9. i'm an aspiring electrician and with what i do that is not a big deal, but is it for my computer? i'm going to go buy a new power supply tomorrow and try it out but i just wanted to see if anybody had some input. i know power supplies go bad all the time and cause random reboots and boot failure, but i haven't read anywhere about symptoms like mine, where the boot process is very inconsistant and locks up at different stages. does it sound like i'm on the right track?

thanks
 
It could be a PSU issue, or even a RAM or motherboard issue. Only way to narrow it down is to try things. What PSU do you have now?
 
its an antec 350w. a few years old i guess. the motherboard is an asus m3a78-em with corsair xms2 6400 ddr2 memory. i'm not sure of any conflicts with this ram and mb.
 
Well, give it a shot with a new quality PSU, and let's see if the problems go away.
 
yeah. i just hope i haven't ruined my new motherboard with a faulty psu. i'll post an update after the new one is in.

thanks
 
well after new power supply, i shut the case and put in the screws certain that the problem was solved. of course not. i got frustrated and pulled out a stick of ram and what do you know, she boots! the two sticks were in dual channel configuration so i thought maybe that wasn't supported until i setup the bios, so i tried different slots and no luck. i'm not sure how i overlooked this before, but i either have a bad stick of ram or a conflict between it and the MB. now i have new everything.......including power supply.
 
westikle said:
well after new power supply, i shut the case and put in the screws certain that the problem was solved. of course not. i got frustrated and pulled out a stick of ram and what do you know, she boots! the two sticks were in dual channel configuration so i thought maybe that wasn't supported until i setup the bios, so i tried different slots and no luck. i'm not sure how i overlooked this before, but i either have a bad stick of ram or a conflict between it and the MB. now i have new everything.......including power supply.
Click to expand...

RMA the RAM to Corsair, they will make it right.
 
First I'm going to put the bad stick in another computer to see wether there really is something wrong with it. If not I guess it is a compatibility issue. What exactly is RMA and would I have to send both sticks back since it came in a 2-pack?
 
RMA stands for Return Merchandise Authorization, and yes, you would most likely have to send back sticks (if only for the fact that Corsair would want to replace it with a matched pair and not just one random stick of memory).
 
ok so i thought i was done but now i have to update:

after pulling the bad stick of ram i finally got windows7 64 bit in stalled. later i though what the hell and i put the bad ram in just to see what would happen. here is what happened....................................................................nothing. the system recognized it and no random reboots, bsod's, anything. i restarted widows several times and even ran the windows memory diagnostic with no problems at all. then a couple days ago i decided to update the bios. ever since then the original "bad" stick has decided to be bad again. i can get to the bios with the bad ram in as long as the good stick is also in. i ran memtest+86 and had like 250 million errors in eight hours. however i cannot run memtest with just the bad stick in so i'm not sure what to make of it. is this common ram behavior? to seem to work for a week then act up again when the environment is changed?
 
It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Honestly, it's pretty clear that the RAM is bad, so you should just go ahead and RMA it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top