Pc problems

[Krygon]

I had a simular issue last month which ended up being ATI catalyst drivers.
Now it is back again with a vengence!( not the same type of crash though).

The System:
a7n8x Asus deluxe MB
xp2700 CPU
9700 pro ATI Video
1.5 gigs Corsair ram.
WD 80 gig hard drive.
Windows XP.
Lots of fans;p

Allright lets start with what happened.
2 nights ago I locked up while I was out at the store. I came back to a frozen PC but no error messages, no BSOD and not rebooted.
I rebooted and continued on gaming awhile, shut down, booted up the next day it ran fine for about 9 hours until it froze again.

Since then it has not lasted over 5 minutes.
It crashes in windows, without any gaming. It even freezes in BIOS after 5-10 minutes. No errors show up in windows error reporting.
Things I have done.
Swapped PSUs. Three times 3 psus. Orginal PSU Thermaltake 480 watt, 2nd PSU unused closet tossed raidmax 420watt PSU , 3rd PSU from other PC that runs more ram, hard drives and a 6800 GT solid a UltraX 600 watt PSU.
PSU always showed stable rails even at time of crash( watching in bios).

Swapped Video Cards. I took out the 9700 pro and put in the 6800 GT and booted into BIOS. Freeze again after a few minutes. I never carried on to try and load windows since it never got past that point.

RAM: I took out my 1.5 gigs of ram stick by stick and waited. Freeze, freeze, freeze. Additionally I took out the corsair xms ram in the other PC and tried it. freeze freeze freeze.

Ok since I could NOT keep windows up enough to complete a discscan or chkdsk I reforrmatted the hard drive using windows CD to boot up.
It froze and locked up 3 times trying to install it.
Wanting to completely rule out a HD I took a old 30 gig HD from closet and tried formatting it. I could never get far enough in windows installation to test it as it froze as well.

CPU temps. They were 36C. Wanting to rule out heat as most crashes soon after booting are typically PSU or heat related, I took off the heatsink and cleaned the CPU and applied new AS5. Temps are now 33C, guess that 2 year old AS3 needed replacing! Still not hot though and well still freezing;/

I disconnected the Floopy Drive and CD drive and booted again. I figured eliminate everything I could right? Still Froze.

So we know the CPU is not overheating at least as far as the monitor shows.
We know the PSU is not the problem.
We know the video card is not the problem.
We know the ram is not the problem.
We know the floppy drive and cd drive is not the problem.
We are pretty sure the hard drive is not the problem as we tried two.
I had taken out the sound card over a year ago so nothing is in any pci slot.

That leaves Monitor, CPU and Motherboard.
Never heard of a LCD causing anything like this but will test it for test sake later to.

Oh and we even tried using the other power strip I run this other pc off of, same freeze.

I have had this motherboard >2 years now and until last month with the driver issue, and now this constant freezing never had a problem/crash since.

I cannot get the system to run long enough at this point to run much if any diagnostic programs, I guess my question is would you all think it is the motherboard or cpu?

 

[Shadowhawk109]

OOOOOOOOOOOOOoooohhh yeah...you've got a messed up mobo/cpu.

Suggestion: buy new mobo, same socket. Swap out cpu's. If the problem goes away, yay. If not, buy new proccy.

Lemme tell you a little story.

Once upon a time, back when the world was young and the 21st century had just begun, I was running my Antec case/ PSU with a MSI K7N Socket A mobo (i believe it was the k7N i might be wrong) and a 1Ghz proccy, an 80GB hard drive, and a Nvidia GeForce 4 MX 4000 64MB gfx card.

I could run any Quake III based game for HOURS on end without any bad results.

But 5 minutes into a game like Star Wars Battlefront, the computer would crash and not be able to boot again for around 6 hours...BIOS wouldnt even load.

We tried swapping PSU's, Gfx cards, hard drives, and even RAM.

Guess what? Bad mobo!

Moral: Most funky problems are caused by a messed up mobo. Anything freeze/crash related is unstable mobo/proccy. RAM/HDD don't USUALLY do that, and they should be checked first, but they are also easiest to check.
Gfx cards also rarely act up, and PSU's dont cause (at least per MY cases) crashes...they just burn up

So, end result...test out mobo/proccy like I said earlier.

 

[Krygon]

Funny you should mention the wait. I got frustrated messing with it and left it shutdown a few hours.
I tried booting it again and it installed windows xp no problems, drivers, updates and everything and it has been up 1.5 hours now no problems.

One thing I noticed is when it froze up you could hear the system power down( but the fans and stuff still was running ).

I had made no changes or even touched it since I tried all the other stuff. Weird thing is I had it shut down the 5 hours prior and it booted right up with the problems.

I cannot find a a7n8x nf2 MB anyplace. Apparently it is discontinued as are all socket a stuff now;/ Finding a processor is looking to be as hard.

I am thinking of a ASrock dual STA board that can do agp and pci( I cannot afford a complete rebuild atm) so I can use my old stuff and a amd 64 3200+ Venice for about $145 shipped.

 

[Shadowhawk109]

I thought the Asus A7N was a 939 mobo...

Don't go for the exact SAME mobo...just socket A would work.

Tigerdirect has some that I know of...go with that...should cost maybe ~$75.

 

[Krygon]

Ya I tried, but most of the ones left out there is biostar or pcchips and with only 2 dimm slots.
A7n8x is a Nforce 2 462 Socket A motherboard.
I have put 6 of those into pcs over the past few years and this is the first one to die. The other 4 being in family/friends pcs.

Tigerdirect only has 2 listed now, a biostar and a foxconn both which are micros and not very appealing. I guess only recently people stopped selling them. Most places are out of stock on the ones they do list.

 

[Krygon]

So it had been working fine since my last post. That was until today.
It froze up on me , it always waited days, I said ok here we go again. Reboot. Ran fine a hour before freezing. Reboot. Ran fine 5 minutes then freeze. Turn off, unplug, hold down power to drain the capacitors. Plug in, turn on. It shuts down almost instantly. Turn on again, I see massive amounts of smoke rising from the case. I unplug it, open it up. The motherboard down under the last PCI slot is CHARCOAL. Just a smeary mess of black and silver. about 2 inches long.

No idea what even was wired there inside the MB, but I would guess there laid my problem.

No cords, or pci slots were being used. So I am assuming it was just something internal on the MB.