Computer shut down

[nitroshift]

As the title says, I was watching TV on my PC when it shut down abruptly. I was having problems with the northbridge chipset temperatures so yesterday I installed a waterblock on it too (already had watercooling for CPU and graphics card). When I installed the waterblock I paid extra-attention not to scratch the circuitry on the motherboard and I put insulating washers on the screws that keep the waterblock attached to the motherboard. On my motherboard I have 2 LED's, one in the southbridge area and one between the RAM seats. Tried to power up the PC, fan starts spinning (fan mounted on the watercooling radiator, attached on the motherboard to the CPU fan socket), the southbridge LED comes on normally, but the one between the RAM seats barely shines (should light up as the southbridge one) and the display doesn't come up either. My first thought was on the power supply, so I took a new one I had at the office, installed it and nothing Tried my power supply in a different PC, checks out OK, so that rules out the powers supply. Tried clearing the CMOS, removing everything but one module of RAM (seated in each of the 4 seats), graphics card and one hard-disk, powered up, still nothing. The motherboard speaker stays silent, no beeps at all. Could the problem be the CPU or the motherboard? Would the motherboard speaker beep or display anything on the monitor if the CPU was dead? The manufacturer's site (and forum) isn't helpful at all. Thanks for any input on this issue, it's doing my head in.

nitropuppy

PS. Machine specs are in my signature.

[Kiki Burgh]

hi nitropuppy! nice rig you got there

my 1st thought of this was ps but you've already discounted that ... i had similar problems (fried Athlon XPs on ECS K7VTA3 ver 7.0) before & was just down to either mobo or proc as culprits (ended up replacing both than go through further lengths of troubleshooting than i already had) ... & usually this is where the bottleneck lies ... i'm sure if you had another similar sys available, you would've checked if your proc works or not (this is the most reliable way IMHO) ... AFAIK there should be bios beep codes to at least give you an idea ifever there was a faulty hw (but proc must exit reset status mode prior to be able to execute the succeeding instructions) ... mobo LEDs are good indicators too & given 1 could not be coming on, i'm leaning towards a mobo failure (but don't take my word for it) ... just the same try reseating parts that remain for your bare-bones test ... hope you get to resolve this soon ... cheers!

Edited January 21, 2010 by Kiki Burgh

[nitroshift]

Turned out to have been the motherboard, just as I suspected. Replaced it with the same model, all fine and dandy now (and kept the Windows activation too)

EDIT:

No need to change my sig either

[puntoMX]

Ha, first you let me read the whole topic and you already got the answer, it would have taken me 10 seconds to come up with the answer .

Next time, rule out a CPU failure, the CPU almost never dies unless you really abuse it (1.8V at it or so ).

PSU was indeed the first to check...

By the way, those Socket A CPUs had hard cores that could crack, in those days it was most likely the CPU indeed.

[nitroshift]

[...]By the way, those Socket A CPUs had hard cores that could crack, in those days it was most likely the CPU indeed.

Which reminds me of an old joke that went by in those days about AMD CPU's:

- Do you know what you call an AMD CPU that ran for 3 minutes without cooling?

- Dead for 2 and a half minutes...

[puntoMX]

lol

Intel P4 had indeed more protection against no or not sufficient cooling, plus the heat spreader helped also.

[Zenskas]

More like dead for 2 minutes and 59 seconds. I did that once with an old Athlon XP 1700+ and I'd say it lasted about a second

Edited January 24, 2010 by Zenskas

[Kiki Burgh]

you're killing me