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Random shutdowns?

S

StewieTheGreat

Gawd
Joined
Apr 12, 2010
Messages
571
Recently my little brother has been complaining that his computer was randomly shutting down and sometime it would take 3 or 4 tries before he could get it to turn on again,So I went to take a look at it and noticed his HD 4870 was idling at like 80C and he had the fan cranked up to 100%,I thought that maybe it was shutting down because it was over heating,I took the card and pulled it apart,the thermal paste was very hard and crusty and the end of the heatsink had a build up of dust and dirt like you would not believe,cleaned it all up and put it back together,got everything back in place and fired it up,card was now idling at 50C with only 35% fan.

I thought sweet,everything is looking good now,I cleaned up the rest of the system,PSU fan,heatsink fan,intake and exhaust fans,everything was cool and working well,so I thought.

This morning he goes to turn on the computer and it attempts to start up,fans spin,lights come on and then it just dies out.try it again and nothing at all,its dead,unplug it wait for a few and try again,same thing tries to start and then nothing,pull the battery while its unplugged and wait,then try one more time,same thing,tries to start then just goes dead.

So I figure that since I was messing with the HD 4870 we should take it out and try the on board graphics,just to see if I somehow messed up the Video card.hook up the monitor and get nothing but the system attempting to start,then going dead.

So,what would the usual suspects be,Motherboard maybe or could it be the PSU,He has no speaker So I cant hear if its giving off any sort of beep,but I really doubt It would make a difference since the system only attempts to start for a split second.

the mother board is a Asrock a780lm-s micro atx board,Amd athlon II x2 250,HD 4870,4 GBs corsair xms and a enermax liberty 620w and a 640Gb WD HD.
 
It's probably either the PSU or motherboard. Try swapping those if you can
 
So I swapped the PSU with one of my backups and still had the same symptoms,So I yanked everything out of the case and tried again,just mobo,ram and cpu,fired up,I then shut it down and connected the hard drive and turned it on again,no problem,made it to the post screen,So I shut it down again and connected some of the case fans,everything is working perfect.There must have been a short in the case some where.

I then proceeded to re install everything into the case,got it all back and fired it up,again no problem until I went to plug in the key board and mouse,once I did that the problem came back,so I unplugged them again and to my surprise the piece that separates the 2 usb ports fell out,WTF I have never seen that happen before.any way,it appears that it must have been broken and causing a short,now that he is using the frot usb ports everything is back to normal.s
 
nice job on the trouble shooting big bro! Hopefully there are no wires left where that piece fell of that could cause another short.
 
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