PC works fine or is stone dead

[Ridley]

About 6months ago I went to turn my PC on and it was stone dead, no activity at all. After repeatedly removing and inserting the power cord, it booted up and has ran flawlessly ever since (except for an intermittent occurence of lag in games lasting about 5 seconds, like the sort when the Hard disk spins, except it wasnt spinning).

 

Yesterday I installed a Vantec Iceberq 4 heatsink for the chipset, as the fan had died - had been for a while, but hadn't had a chance to get around to replacing it. So after connecting everything back up, I went to turn it on, and like before, it was stone dead again.

 

I tried swapping around the power switch cord and all that, but still wouldn't turn on. I noticed that the yellow LED next to the RAM was extremely dim, as opposed to the brightly lit yellow standby LED next to the furthest PCI slot - they are normally the same brightness. I tried powering up again using the switch on the mobo, with no luck, and the dim LED had turned off completely. I made sure that the new heatsink was not touching any capacitors, which as far as I could see it wasn't - I did have to cut and file some of it off to make it fit properly in the first place.

 

While fiddling with the power cord and the power connection into the motherboard (by reinserting and wriggling it about), I noticed the yellow RAM LED was dimly lit again, so I pressed the switch down on the motherboard and it magically booted up, and POST'ed without a problem. So I turned it off and reconnected everything, but the yellow LED was off again, but after removing and reinserting the power cord and wriggling the power connector on the mobo it lit up, but was again dim, however it turned on again and booted without problem, and as this happens, the dim LED turns back to its normal brightness as if there was no problem to begin with.

 

I have been running 3DMark and Prime95 etc to test for stability, and as far as I can see, it's still as stable as it ever was. So I turned it off to see if the problem would repeat - and it did. So retrying the fiddling with the power connectors, it booted up, but didn't past POST, instead I had 3 of the red diagnosis LED's on with the last one flashing on and off, before they all turned off bar the last one where the mobo lets out a long beep and nothing is displayed on the screen. However, by pressing reset, it boots normally and passes POST without a problem, booting into Windows normally and running stable.

 

My specs are:

Athlon 64 3200+ @ 2.6GHz (1.525V)

DFI Lanparty UT NF4 Ultra-D

Geforce 6800GT

Antec Smartblue (Smartpower) 350W

160GB Seagate SATA HDD

1GB Kingston DDR400

 

So does anyone know what is causing this? I thought that if I had cracked the NF4 chip it would have no chance of booting at all - I'm typing this post on this computer.

[bldegle2]

we have a problem houston.....

 

"Antec Smartblue (Smartpower) 350W"

 

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

 

do a search here, 'recommended dfi power supply', your rig is way under powered (480w minimum, and it can't just be any PS, thus the reason to read up on proper PS's....)

 

BTW, if you haven't figured it out, it is your PS balking at the high power requirements of the DFI board. some under powered PS's will work for awhile, but sooner or later they go bad from the stress, and...............

 

when it does blow completely, it can take down several parts of your rig in the process, i suggest you get a new, proper PS ASAP.

 

laterzzzz.....

[radodrill]

Agreed, you need min 480W native 24-pin PSU; the 350W is way underpowered to begin with and is probably on it's last leg.

[Ridley]

Yeah well I assumed that since it worked without issue for about 2 years that the PSU was coping.

 

Since I'm considering an upgrade around Q1 next year, if I buy a new PSU now I need it to be able to handle a new system as well, which will most likely have a dual/quad CPU and a next gen GPU (no SLI), and an overclocking motherboard similar to my current DFI. Do you guys think 600W will be ample for this, or should I go higher? Looking at the recommended PSU list, the OCZ GameXstream and Corsair 600W units look like a good option, or are there better ones?

[Sharp]

Hello,

 

Yeah 600W will be ok.

Anything from OCZ, Corsair, Tagan, FSP, Silverstone, Hiper, Coolermaster will be fine.

[Tameanaka]

OK i'm having the exact same issue, except with 2 computers!!!!!! They both went stone dead a week apart, wtf?? What's the issue?