My son's PC has just started crashing, or rather switching itself off, no blue screen, no restart. In the past it's always been one of those PCs that never seems to crash however much it gets pushed. It will run for an hour or so, then crash. It might crash after a minute or two after a restart, or go for much longer, so it's fairly intermittent. There's a short series of motherboard beeps that lasts 3 or 4 seconds just after the monitor goes blank and everything powers off:. Recorded it with a dictaphone: http://www.easy-share.com/1905483388/beep.mp3 Gigabyte 7vt600p-rz motherboard Athlon socket A processor 2GB ddr ram 6600gt gfx Tagan 480 U01 psu Samsung HD502IJ XP SP3 Problem is, I haven't got any spare components to swap out. TIA
might sound stupid, but have you made sure everything is plugged in nice and tight, especially the 20/24 pin mobo connector? It does sound like it could be PSU related. Do you have a friend with any parts that you could borrow?
I'll check all the wires when I get a moment. I've never had a psu failure before, or a hdd failure. Had ram errors and the usual software glitches, that's about all. So can anyone give a brief run-down of what happens with the various hardware failures, because I was wondering if it the issue was hdd failure. Also, are the warning beeps powered by the cmos battery or the psu,? I'd assumed it was the cmos battery.
Hmm, that sounds like a temp warning to me. Have you checked the CPU fan to make sure it's still running/CPU is not overheating?
The cpu fan was the first thing I checked after the first crash. Also had the pc sat in the bios and watched the temps, cpu seemed normal for this pc, around 54c. I might leave it at the bios overnight. So if the fault was hdd, would it in theory stay up ok in the bios indefinitely, but still crash if it's a psu fault?
don't know if that would work, (I don't know much about psu's) but I would assume that the power draw in the Bios screen would be lower than the power draw while running the OS. The graphics card, for example, would draw more power when it's actually working harder (displaying 3D images/folding etc...) or the HDD would draw more power if it's caching/reading/writing. If the PC was left in the bios screen I would have thought the power draw would be pretty constant (and low) and not trigger a reboot.
Yeah, it's unlikely ot be a hard drvie problem as they don't normally cause reboots and tend to manifest themselves as error messages, corrupt data, or bluescreens, non of which you've mentioned. Tried installing any temp monitoring software in windows? CPUID Hardware monitor is a good all round one, might show you something is a bit out. RwD
Just had a closer look with the case open. If I run prime95, it crashes within a few seconds. First of all it's the monitor that goes off, then the short series of beeps start whilst everything inside the pc is still running. As the beeps stop, the pc shuts down. Could it be the gfx card, as it's the monitor that goes off first? Tried running cpuid, all looked normal.
Could one of your fans, CPU or System, be slowing down when it gets hot, binding the bearing? I recognise the error sound, but I've not built a Socket A in years. Thought it was overheating, but starting to think it is a bad fan/mis-reporting speed. Can you check your BIOS and see if the Fan Fail warning is set for both CPU and System fans. If it is, and you feel comfortable with this, try turning the warning off for the system fan warning first and see if that stops it shutting off. Obviously, you'll want to keep your finger on the power switch in case it starts getting too hot, keep an eye on it with CPUID or similar (speed fan etc). All the best.
i'm inclined to say that your motherboard is failing. also check the voltages of the 5v, 3.3v, 1.5v and 12v rails in your BIOS. each value should be within 10% of the stated value.
After a bit of searching the web I found a list of the relevant beeps. No Beeps Short, No power, Bad CPU/MB, Loose Peripherals One Beep Everything is normal and Computer POSTed fine Two Beeps POST/CMOS Error One Long Beep, One Short Beep Motherboard Problem One Long Beep, Two Short Beeps Video Problem One Long Beep, Three Short Beeps Video Problem Three Long Beeps Keyboard Error Repeated Long Beeps Memory Error Continuous Hi-Lo Beeps CPU Overheating Took cpu heatsink off, cleaned up old thermal paste, added some fresh paste and reseated cooler. Bingo! Been running for 5 hours or so without issue. Cheers to all who replied.
Weird that it'd suddenly do it, although I suppose warm weather could've just tipped the paste over the edge... At least it's sorted!