Figure this brain teaser out....

[ShinRa]

Ok boys here's a toughy. I have a fairly new comp as many of you know, its only about 7 months old. It's an fx-53 with an asus a8v deluxe mobo. Now heres the story:

I shut my computer down like normal last night before going to work. Nothing strange has been happening, no crashes, no random reboots, nothing. Then, I get home from work, press the power button and.....nothing. I freak out. I look and see that my mother board light isnt on. But..this motherboard is brand new? Why did it short circuit or burn out? No...cant be. I begin to cry. As the countless tears stream down my face, I see a ray of light. I get a genious idea. The power supply! It has to be! My computer is on a rug...I've been meaning to do something about that....maybe it has something to do with that! Idk! What do you guys think it is? My motherboard, or my power supply? Its a 560w Thermaltake PSU, pretty high end. Idk. I really dont feel like switching out my mobo. So I'd like to avoid that but if its fried, then so be it. You guys tell me what you think, I need help! :sniper:

 

[Eg.]

unhook the power plug and try again

 

[ShinRa]

tried everything. im scared. my friend here says psu's never short out or never just stop working. is he right?

 

[[Matt]]

tried everything. im scared. my friend here says psu's never short out or never just stop working. is he right?

no. I've had a few PSU's go pop on me before

As for the source of the problem it could be anything really. Try another PSU if you have one. Try pushing the 20 pin ATX connector into the motherboard a bit more to see if its come loose? Try reseating the CPU into its socket? Also try reseating the graphics card into the AGP slot?

 

[ShinRa]

Idk. Its none of the other components, simply because the motherboard light isnt on. The mobo light was on despite if i even had a cpu attached to it. Now I just bought another power supply off of newegg. If this doesnt fix the problem, I'm gonna send the psu back and get another mobo which im feeling VERY reluctant to do, because taking everything apart and putting all back is my worst nightmare.

 

[MuToiD_MaN]

Turn the switch on the PSU back on

/Couldn't help myself

 

[oni_666]

I'm taking a guess.
But do you leave your PC on standby, I.e. you shut down as normal, The PC switched off, But you did'nt switch the PSU switch to off, You left the PC on standby and the LED on the motherboard was lit.

If this is so, Its possible that while you were at work, You had a power cut at home.
When the power supply came back on,(still while you were at work) A power surge, took out your motherboard.
If you don't switch off by flciking the switch on the PSU after you've shutdown, Then the motherboard is still recieving power through the PSU, Enough ambient power from the PSU's capacitors to light the LED, Get a power surge and it could blow the board.
I'm only guessing though!

 

[baron insig]

mmmm i never use standy becasue i dont have ups and tho i have a surg protector, but that was cheap so i reckon it is poo

jsut borrow a friends pc and swap out parts! its the only sure fire way than jsut buying new parts randomly!

 

[ShinRa]

ok this is quite a news update....

out of nowhere, this morning....about 56 hours after the incident, i look into my case and see the mobo light was back on. i just fired up my comp...and here i am right now. sadly, i just spent 140 on 2nd day air delivery of a new power supply. what should i do? what the hell was it? the psu? should i switch it with the new one anyway?

its so weird....im like so confused as to wtf happened. oh and this is kinda funny. i have that xaser III thermaltake case. and i never could figure out how to get the THERMALTAKE running down the middle to light up. but somehow while i was messing around with all the plugs and switches inside the case, it turned on when i turned my comp on and i just noticed it was lit lol. but its just sooooooooooooooo weird. i never go into standby. i have a surge protector that i plug my stuff into.

Sum up of the story:

1. I shut my comp down with no problems known.
2. I come home and the light in my mobo is out, do everything you can imagine to get it working...nothing works.
3. A day and a half later, as I'm getting ready for school, I notice the light is back on. I try it out and here I am.


WTF!!!?!?!??

 

[oldagerocker]

A similar thing happend to me, i have to swop out componants to find out whats wrong. And i just cant be arsed, i know the graphics card isnt gone so im upgrading to a shuttle and moving my graphcs card into that, then swopping around with uber cheap parts and selling the whole thing

My story; (cue sad violin music)

1. watching tv on pc, screen loses signal
2. take to shop, they say mobo gone, gfx hasnt
3. replace mobo
4. still not work
5. shop say could be anything, wont give money back for telling me it wrong part - me not trust pc 'repair' shops ever again

 

[ShinRa]

That sucks dude, precisely why i would never trust a pc repair place.

 

[Jimmeh]

Hehe, I love it when that happens. That's my fix for everything. If something buggers up, I just leave it for a week and let it fix itself.

Suprisingly it works wonders!

 

[oni_666]

Shinra...I've been racking my brains about your problem since my last post and why it suddenly cured itself.
Well I remembered about a time when I had my Asus A7V600 board, and one night I'd switched the pc off as normal, And the exact same thing happened to me.
I came back to the pc, the next night, and switched on, Nothing, nadda, zip, No little LED on, nothing.

So I virtually disassembled the whole pc, took everything off the board, all the wires, and then slowly rebuilt it, Checking every wire corresponded to the pins as stated in the manual.
And what happened?
It frigging worked.
But the Bios POST screen said something like "CPU overclock failed, bios loaded failsafe defaults, blah! blah|! blah!"
So I put all my settings back in the bios and it worked perfectly.
The next night, I updated my bios, using Asus bios update (on the disc) And I never saw that problem again.

I'm guessing its a specific Asus problem.
Try updating the bios.
Funny thing was, even though the POST screen said CPU overclock failed, My cpu was'nt overclocked.

 

[ShinRa]

lol ive had that too. sometimes when my external hd is on before my comp is, it says i overclocked the cpu lol.

hey is there any program to see how my psu is doing? like the status of it and its condition etc?

 

[oni_666]

Yeh the program motherboard board monitor 5, It tells you voltages from the PSU and fan speeds, temps etc.
You can use it to record over a certain period of time and it will make a graph of what your voltages, fan speeds temps are over 12 hours or whatever..

I actually remembered something else the other night..About your original problem..and it makes sense that this would have caused what happened.

There is a process in computer systems called "Thermal creep", What happens is that over time the heating up of certain components like your memory and AGP card, Can cause the metal contacts on the edge of the card or dimm sticks to expand as they heat up.
This expansion causes the card to push itself slightly out of its socket, And thus stop making proper contact with all the pins in the motherboard socket.

So one night you go on your PC, the temperature causes the card/s to heat up and start to raise outta their sockets, This may only happen on one end of a card, and can still happen even if you think the card is secured properly.
Then once the PC is switched off, the metal contacts cool down.
And when you switch on a again, the contacts are not making proper connections in the m/board sockets and the PC won't boot.

Opening the case and pushing the cards down into the sockets, reseats them and fixes the problem.
This is the logical conclusion for a PC that works one night but not the next, even though no settings have changed, and the PC was shutdown correctly.