Random Crashes and Restarts

Moonwraith

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Heya guys,

My mates been having quite a bit of problem with his new pc; The parts i know of his pc off the top of my head are as follows:

Pentium 4 3ghz
MSI Neo2
2x 512 TwinX Corsair XMS Pro
Antec Truepower 480watt
6800 Ultra

Riiiight, i think that's right enough anyways. He's been having a lot of random restarts as of late. At one point, hew as having a problem where his optical drives were causing full lock ups, and recently after removing his Dvd-Rom he can now fully use his Dvd-Rw (before it was crashing whenever he tried to burn)

That was solved.. just blamed the dvd-rom, but his pc's getting more and more unstable, and windows is now blaming hardware.

A random thing i've noticed is that the fan on his PSU, possibly the fan, but something makes an odd noise as it is, and suddenly all of this - not sure if it might be that, but MBM5 has shown the following, very random:
<see attachment - hint, some of the voltages are off the scale :crosseyed:>

Dunno if you guys can figure out what the hell's causing the freeze up and random restarts (every 30 mins or so)

Any more info you need and i can find out from him for ya

Cheers :)
 

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Check that the psu fan is working properly and that it's not over heating as this problem has caused my older system to randomly restart.
 
ming said:
Check that the psu fan is working properly and that it's not over heating as this problem has caused my older system to randomly restart.

Im wondering if it could be the PSU, look at the (+12v) and (-12v) values:
(+12v) -> (+1.60v)
(-12v) -> (-178.68v)

(-5v) seems to be a little off at (-6.80v) but its not as bad as the (12v)'s


I may explain crashing, system n ot getting the proper power.
 
MBM is reporting the voltages wrong (-178 on the -12 would fireball the entire system).

Have your buddy go into bios at start up and check the fan speeds and voltages in there. If they are close it is probably not the power supply.

Now the bad news is it could be anything:
RAM
CPU
MB
Power Supply
Loose cables
Bad drive cables
Bad HD or optical drive
Video Card

So you replace each item, one at a time, with a KNOWN GOOD PART! and see if the problem goes away. When it does you have the culprit. If it doesn't you may have 2 defective parts. This gets really ugly because you now have to place each item into a known good system and try it.
 
LeeJend said:
MBM is reporting the voltages wrong (-178 on the -12 would fireball the entire system).

Im not so sure on the negative values, I know +178 would fry the system, as fas as I kno the negatives are for zeros (1 = +12, 0 = -12). I could be entirely wrong though.

LeeJend said:
Have your buddy go into bios at start up and check the fan speeds and voltages in there. If they are close it is probably not the power supply.

I agree, that way we know the correct values, some monitoring either show the wrong values or dont kno how to correctly interpret the data.
 
Hey guys, thanks for responses - rep will be spread for help so far

Checked the voltages in bios and all seemed fine, so i reckon mbm5 is having a dodgy time reading 'em!

Well, that's one weight off my mind ^^

Riiiiiiight, so next is messing around with hardware, that could take a while guys, but i'll let you know how it goes stripping it to bare minimum and swapping for working parts!
 

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