is my power supply dying?

[benbaked]

this is a problem that has recently surfaced in my main rig (biostar found in sig). i have a dualboot on it, xp64 on one drive and ubuntu6 on the other.

when i start the computer up (even if its not overclocked and running at stock settings) the past two days it won't bootup with video. i've tried both my x800gto2 and my agp ti4200 at bootup and it's the same story. if i turn the computer off and let it sit for about ten minutes then i can bootup, but i tried that last night and it turned on for about eight seconds and then shutdown, that's the only time its done that. the room that it is in is not warm, even right now at 5:30am it was running linux all night then i went to reboot and bam! no video. the video card is not overclocked anymore either.

i've checked the board out and it "appears" to look okay. when it was running just now i felt around in there and nothing was overly hot to the touch. any ideas? does this look like a power supply issue or a heat issue? or maybe my opteron is dying? (giving me an excellent excuse to upgrade to conroe in a month :D)

[R4z0r4mu5 Pr|m3]

could be defective ram, mobo, harddrive

i doubt it's the cpu or psu, you can try blowing a fan at the cpu or give the psu cool air somehow and see if it helps, to make sure they're not overheating

[Deathknight]

Have you tried measuring your rails with a multimeter? That would go a long way towards diagnosing this. Also you may want to start disconnecting peripherals to see if maybe it would boot properly with no drives etc.

[benbaked]

i'll get back to basics and start checking; the motherboard, ram, and power supply are just slightly over six months old. i had tried valueselect ram in this system yesterday and it exhibited the same behaviour.

the behaviour is really similar to a dying soltek s462 board i had a couple of years ago. thanks for the advice :thup: