Have an old PC I haven't used since mid-2014 that I wanted to get running and give away. A year or so ago I plugged the PC in and the PSU instantly made crackling noises so I quickly unplugged it without trying to boot obviously.
Fast forward a few weeks ago I took the PSU out, cleaned it fully and stuff tried to put it in alone and didn't get the same crackle sounds but a minor one so I just bought a new 600w PSU on Amazon, a Lepa that was only about 50 euros but met my power requirements.
The PC in question - Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Intel i-7 920 (first gen)
Asus Rampage II Extreme
12gb XMS3 Corsair Ram (6x2gb sticks)
Sandisk 120gb SSD
Antec 1200 case
Asus Triton Cooler
So I put it together and put my ancient Nvidia 9800gt 512mb card in, got to the Bios, Everything looked good, the Bios was intact so I turned the CPU fan profile from Turbo to Standard to get some peace. So I was doing restarts to check boot order and USB drive/windows disk for install and the PC started to only show every few restarts, The PC would boot but the screen would remain black with monitor saying no signal and going to sleep, since every few restarts I would get to bios and beyond I figured it was just a compatibility thing and not recognizing and would eventually be sorted with drivers.
So I figured I would put my Radeon R9 270x in with the SSD so It was present during windows install and not added after, now that the forever reliable 9800gt had the PC showing me signs of vitals.
I installed Windows via disk, did an update or two, had the PC running on the internet, downloaded HWInfo and saw good results, I installed the latest Radeon driver which said it had failed but the drivers were on the PC and according to HWInfo the GPU had hit its normal clocks when something loaded. I installed unigine benchmark which didn't want to open so I figured I would do a restart since I rememberd Windows 7 likes restarts after installations.
During a restart or the next few restarts it just went back to showing no signal and not making it to the bios or windows.
So what have I done since then, well 20+ restarts to it not coming back I figured there was something more than compatibility issue here.
- I have removed and replaced the CMOS battery
- I have removed half of the RAM cause it was 6gb with 6gb added a year or two later (made sure to remove the right sticks)
- I have put the Nvidia 9800GT in
Eventually I noticed the CPU light next to the 8 pin was gone, yesterday the light was green and today there's nothing at all. Eventually I now noticed the Ram light is gone too. So now I am starting to think it's the MOBO and not the CPU? There are other lights still on the MOBO like normal so i'm not sure.
Googling these days can be hard, I am starting to see a lot of misinformation that I know is wrong so it becomes hard to believe some of the other stuff, that and a lot of problem specific fixes don't apply to your case.
Sorry for the long post but I wanted to provide all the Info I could to avoid some of the first questions I will get in response.
Thanks
Fast forward a few weeks ago I took the PSU out, cleaned it fully and stuff tried to put it in alone and didn't get the same crackle sounds but a minor one so I just bought a new 600w PSU on Amazon, a Lepa that was only about 50 euros but met my power requirements.
The PC in question - Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
Intel i-7 920 (first gen)
Asus Rampage II Extreme
12gb XMS3 Corsair Ram (6x2gb sticks)
Sandisk 120gb SSD
Antec 1200 case
Asus Triton Cooler
So I put it together and put my ancient Nvidia 9800gt 512mb card in, got to the Bios, Everything looked good, the Bios was intact so I turned the CPU fan profile from Turbo to Standard to get some peace. So I was doing restarts to check boot order and USB drive/windows disk for install and the PC started to only show every few restarts, The PC would boot but the screen would remain black with monitor saying no signal and going to sleep, since every few restarts I would get to bios and beyond I figured it was just a compatibility thing and not recognizing and would eventually be sorted with drivers.
So I figured I would put my Radeon R9 270x in with the SSD so It was present during windows install and not added after, now that the forever reliable 9800gt had the PC showing me signs of vitals.
I installed Windows via disk, did an update or two, had the PC running on the internet, downloaded HWInfo and saw good results, I installed the latest Radeon driver which said it had failed but the drivers were on the PC and according to HWInfo the GPU had hit its normal clocks when something loaded. I installed unigine benchmark which didn't want to open so I figured I would do a restart since I rememberd Windows 7 likes restarts after installations.
During a restart or the next few restarts it just went back to showing no signal and not making it to the bios or windows.
So what have I done since then, well 20+ restarts to it not coming back I figured there was something more than compatibility issue here.
- I have removed and replaced the CMOS battery
- I have removed half of the RAM cause it was 6gb with 6gb added a year or two later (made sure to remove the right sticks)
- I have put the Nvidia 9800GT in
Eventually I noticed the CPU light next to the 8 pin was gone, yesterday the light was green and today there's nothing at all. Eventually I now noticed the Ram light is gone too. So now I am starting to think it's the MOBO and not the CPU? There are other lights still on the MOBO like normal so i'm not sure.
Googling these days can be hard, I am starting to see a lot of misinformation that I know is wrong so it becomes hard to believe some of the other stuff, that and a lot of problem specific fixes don't apply to your case.
Sorry for the long post but I wanted to provide all the Info I could to avoid some of the first questions I will get in response.
Thanks
