BF2S Forums Computer keeps turning off

King_County_Downy wrote:

Try running some RAM tests. Most instantanious reboots are caused by a stick of RAM going bad.

What would be a good program to use?

Last edited by bubbass (2006-09-25 11:46:57)

Just to clarify - does the PC shutdown, or reboot?

I've only heard of that for heat issues.  Everything else tends twords lockup or reboot.  However, you've takes all the right steps to proving it's NOT heat.

What are you using to keep an eye on the temps?  Can it also report voltage?

i would save this one for last, but try using a different outlet or power cable.  Are you using a surge protector also?  Also, if you have another PC, swap the parts 1 by 1, PSU, Vid card, memory, hard drive even.  IF all else fails, it is probably the motherboard.

Well, from experience, it's USUALLY the PSU.... But if you just got a new one, that'd be pretty horrible (except for the fact, that you prolly have a warranty on it because it's new). I've encountered a similar problem about 20-25 times over the last 15 or so years. It's a bitch to figure out.
In the late 80'ies-early 90'ies it was a virus that did this kinda crap. Forunately it was not very good at propegating, so I only saw about 2 of these over a 2-3 year period. Then with the advent of the 40 Mhz PCI bus, I saw a similar problem when not all components were built to HANDLE the increased speed of the bus (you're not overclocking your PC, are you ?). I saw this also 2 or 3 times within a year or so, then the Pentium chips started getting cheap enough that people forgot about the old bus speeds.
Next one was a MOTHERFUCKER of a bitch to solve... It took me almost 14 days of straight testing to find the problem. the CASE caused a short when you activeted cerain features of the board. A new case solved the issue.
After this, I saw a similar problem with certain popular motherboards that would not run with an equally popular harddrive (no names, because asus and quantum might not like the bad publicity). If too large a partition size was created, the PC would reboot or shut down once you tried to access the "extended" part of the harddrive. Later BIOS upgrades solved this problem (have you tried upgrading your Mobo BIOS ?) Needless to say, we immediately stopped supporting these mobos.
Beyond that, I've seen something similar when the capacitors on a PSU were getting old, or over worked. But if you've tried a new PSU, and you dont have any problems with your voltage rails, then it SHOULDN'T be the cause of the problem. However, just to test it.... Try attaching a couple of multimeters to the PC. Check the votalge rails. Possibly the problem occurs only periodically.
Also, a good piece of advice is to ask your hardware vendor if they've had any problems with the PSU and your specific hardware config (mobo, CPU and GPU).

Twist wrote:

Next one was a MOTHERFUCKER of a bitch to solve... It took me almost 14 days of straight testing to find the problem. the CASE caused a short when you activeted cerain features of the board. A new case solved the issue.

That happened to me before. Took me fucking ages to figure out what it was and even longer to convince myself that's what the problem was. I just couldn't believe it was the case, which made diagnosing it a biatch.

Drove me nuts for a long time.

I had a bad UPS do the same thing, random shutdowns.  I spent weeks playing with it.  I changed out my PSU, CPU, ram, un plugged everything from cd-roms to floppy.  Luckily I have lots of spare parts so it didn't cost me $.

check........your shutdown temp threshold in the BIOS some boards have a temp setting for if the processor gets too hot it shuts the pc down..... you say you changed the PSU this might have set you settings to the default ...worth a look before you go swapping everything