WTF is wrong with my computer?

[wingman99]

Sounds like a good idea to try the Celeron.

 

[SMOKEU]

Possibly faulty caps on the board out-of-the-box!

Gotten reports of this happening before, which is as rare as a hibiscus blooming in Alaska!

On all 3 mid range Asus motherboards?

 

[SMOKEU]

I flashed the BIOS with the latest one and I'm still waiting for my Celeron chip I ordered a few days ago. For the past week, I've run Prime95 in blend, large FFTs and small FFTs mode, OCCT and Linpack every day and night with no problems.

Today I was in an RDP session which would have put very little load on my system, and then it froze, and gave a BSOD when I tried to boot into Windows. It won't even boot into Windows at all now.

 

[wingman99]

BSOD, sounds like you will have to wait for the Celeron.

 

[SMOKEU]

I repaired Windows with the startup repair and installed the Celeron, reset the BIOS and it passed 10 runs of IBT. Something the i7 can't do!

But, I was doing a Heaven benchmark to test the difference between the i7 and Celeron, and at the end of the benchmark the system froze completely, so I had to force boot it off. Now it won't even boot into Windows. It just freezes every time. Startup repair launches automatically, but that too freezes.

I put in my Windows 8 DVD to try and do the repair that way, but the system freezes after about 15 seconds into loading the DVD, so I can't do anything with that. Can't reinstall the OS, can't do anything with it.

So now I'm onto the 3rd motherboard, 3rd set of RAM, 3rd boot drive, 2nd PSU, 2nd CPU on this build, and I'm stuck at square 1. You can see why I'm very pissed off now, can't you? My bank account has been drained completely buying new parts that I don't need to try and fix this, and more than 2 years after the problems began I'm no closer to solving it.

And no, I haven't tried to overclock the Celeron either.

 

[S_I_N]

something is very wrong somewhere. I doubt its the components. Have you hade the homes electrical system check for surges or spikes??

 

[SMOKEU]

something is very wrong somewhere. I doubt its the components. Have you hade the homes electrical system check for surges or spikes??

I haven't had the electrical system in the house checked. The house is about 55-60 years old. We've never had problems with the electrical system in the house that I know of. The lights never flicker or anything like that.

 

[Conumdrum]

Get a $150+ UPS to protect the PC and monitor the voltages. At least your voltage will be stable and you can set monitoring through a USB to the PC. Never know. You could be getting spikes or have a bad ground, who knows?

From what you have done, besides replace the PSU, Hmmm? Hire a witch doctor.

 

[SMOKEU]

Get a $150+ UPS to protect the PC and monitor the voltages. At least your voltage will be stable and you can set monitoring through a USB to the PC. Never know. You could be getting spikes or have a bad ground, who knows?

From what you have done, besides replace the PSU, Hmmm? Hire a witch doctor.

I'm a bit hesitant to use a cheap UPS, since my last one nearly set the house on fire before it sent 275V through my computer. Do the line interactive UPSs protect the hardware much, or do I really need an online (true) UPS to protect the hardware properly? I have replaced the case as well so it's unlikely there's an internal grounding issue (but there could be electrical problems with the house).

I'm very tempted to sell this computer as faulty for a huge loss, then maybe I can afford to build another computer and buy a semi decent UPS in a year or so from now. The only thing is that if I sell my computer now I won't be able to afford another one for at least a year, but I can't stand the current reliability problems and I think the hardware damage has already been done from whatever has caused it. Each time I think I have finally fixed the problem, whatever it is keeps coming back again and again and again...

 

[Conumdrum]

150+ isn't cheap. Mine was a bit under 200 and is a 1500 VA Cyberpower. Seems fine to me. You can spend more, it's just a PC.

 

[tungureanu]

Is your house close(50-100M) to a transforming station? A friend of mine had a similar problem. he found out that he was getting ~240V with large fluctuations in power because he had a transforming station ~70 m from the house and when it started dieing the station started to take out appliences,and his rig.

Note: this was in Bucharest about 3-4 years ago.

 

[SMOKEU]

Is your house close(50-100M) to a transforming station? A friend of mine had a similar problem. he found out that he was getting ~240V with large fluctuations in power because he had a transforming station ~70 m from the house and when it started dieing the station started to take out appliences,and his rig.

Note: this was in Bucharest about 3-4 years ago.

I live nowhere near a transforming station. The nearest one is about 10km from where I live.

I have measured the AC voltage coming from the walls on several occasions, and it's right where it should be at 240-241V.

I've lived at this house for about 5 years, and have never noticed any strange electrical activity. We don't have any other appliances fail. One thing to note is that my monitor started becoming noisy when there's a large amount of white or other very bright colours on the screen, such as when viewing Wikipedia. I suspect the capacitors are at fault in the monitor and the noise is very faint, but clearly audible if there's very little background noise. The monitor is just under 2 years old, and it could be completely unrelated or maybe it's not.

 

[tungureanu]

dont think large station, more like the neighbourhood power amplifying station like this

 

[SMOKEU]

dont think large station, more like the neighbourhood power amplifying station like this

I can safely say that there's nothing like that within a few km of where I live.