It's the "Which one of my components is screwed up?" game!

July 17, 2015 3:24 PM

My desktop PC has taken a turn for the worst and after some troubleshooting I'm still not exactly sure whats going on. PC doctors of mefi - help!

I've got a desktop PC I built myself about 2 years ago. About three weeks ago, I upgraded to an r9 390 GPU and a 750W PSU from a radeon 7850 and 500W PSU , respectively.

My current system in addition to those two parts is :
Asus M5a97 mobo
AMD FX-6300 CPU
8 gigs of corsair ddr3 ram
1 256 gig samsung SSD
1 1 TB toshiba HDD
Windows 8.1 installed on the SSD (64 bit)
and an offbrand dvd drive

After the upgrade my pc had been acting just fine when a few days ago, in the middle of a game of Witcher 3, my PC hard crashed to the boot screen. It immediately started going around in an infinite loop of the windows "preparing automatic repair" screen, followed by a restart and then back around again. My first thought was that my windows install had gone bad, so I attempted to do a restore. However my PC seems to only randomly recognize that I am trying to boot from the DVD drive (with my windows disc in it) , if it even detects the drive at all either in the BIOS or when I put the disc in.

When I finally did manage to get into Windows 8 restore tools - I reverted to a restore point created a few days ago. I booted to the desktop , everything seemed fine for about 15 seconds - then a crash and back to the restart cycle all over again. I was going to try and do a total wipe or maybe run chkdsk /r on my C drive through the win8 tools command prompt, but I cant seem to get back there. I also tried switching the SATA ports for my drives just for the heck of it but it didn't get me anywhere.

Some other stuff I'm seeing:
-BIOS screen locking up and text getting all garbled up when scrolling through menus
-USB mouse and/or keyboard randomly not working
-Maybe 10% of the time my monitor remains totally blank after a restart - nothing comes up.
-ASUS splash screen / Windows repair screen locking up.

I'm leaning towards the depressing idea that my motherboard is on its deathbed. It does seem strange that this is happening pretty soon after an upgrade but as far as I can tell my other components are fine, at least they seem fine when I look at them in the BIOS - other than the DVD drive which as I mentioned above seems to show up at times of its own choosing.

I don't mind troubleshooting but I'm a bit of a novice when it comes to figuring out hardware failure this bad. Any ideas based on what I've described so far? Anything else I can try?

Thank You!

posted by ajax287 to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Best answer: Remove things that are unessential and see if it becomes more stable.

Could be PSU and if so, disconnecting/removing the videocard (I assume there is onboard video?), 2nd hard drive, DVD drive should use way less power and might help. Disconnect all USB stuff except a keyboard and mouse.

If it still doesn't POST, remove 1st HD, disconnect mouse, remove memory to see if the BIOS works then.

I've gone through more power supplies than motherboards over the years, but if you remove everything and the BIOS is still flaky, it can only be something like 3 things (PSU/MB/CPU)
posted by jclarkin at 3:35 PM on July 17, 2015

With that type of instability, I would first try to rule out a PSU issue. In addition to what jclarkin suggests, you could also revert back to your old setup (pre-upgrade PSU + video card) to determine whether the new PSU is the culprit.
posted by gox3r at 3:40 PM on July 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Seconding potential power supply issue.

Does the system boot up and run normally with the old 500w power supply? That would be my first test.

What brand and model of power supply did you purchase? There's some pretty junky ones out there.
posted by emptythought at 3:57 PM on July 17, 2015 [2 favorites]

Yeah, assuming you still have the old PSU and GPU lying around the first step is to revert to you previous known-good config. Flaky PSU would be a good first guess culprit for the symptoms you're seeing, but if the new GPU is busted and stomping all over stuff on the PCI bus that could also cause it.
posted by russm at 4:36 PM on July 17, 2015

Response by poster: ...just finished testing my PC with my old components and unfortunately I still haven't pinpointed anything. First I tried swapping in my old GPU - same problems. Then I took out the new PSU and put my old 500w back in so that my rig was identical to its pre-upgrade status, and I'm still seeing the same stuff - "preparing automatic repair" followed by a restart. Or it just freezes at the Asus or Windows screen like before.

My psu btw is a 750W EVGA G2 80+ Gold - seems pretty reputable from the reviews I saw on it....

guess its not looking good for my CPU or motherboard....argh
posted by ajax287 at 5:25 PM on July 17, 2015

memtest86 is a relatively easy way to check if your RAM has gone funny.
posted by aubilenon at 5:55 PM on July 17, 2015

You might try resetting the BIOS (take the coin battery out), see if it's in an indeterminate state, let it start over. Then I would suggest blowing with canned air all the cooling surfaces to make sure your are not over the thermal limit of a component, ram, or the south bridge.
posted by nickggully at 6:37 PM on July 17, 2015

Best answer: My next guess because of the update is some kind of drive corruption. On EFI systems booting an EFI partition, it can cause it to hang at the post/logo screen. It would also cause the weird issues with windows.

If you disconnect your hard drive and boot from like, an ubuntu liveUSB does it still act up?

I wouldn't jump straight to weird motherboard issues or bad ram. This system was fine before. I'm more in the camp that the new power supply is screwy but that it also caused some drive corruption, before i'd be in the camp that something is damaged or failing.
posted by emptythought at 8:08 PM on July 17, 2015

Best answer: Sounds like motherboard or processor to me... unsure which, but this happened to me exactly about two years ago. I swapped everything except the motherboard/processor, and had the same issues.

I don't know which it was because i swapped both out for newer models (they were ~6y old).
posted by Verdandi at 8:11 PM on July 17, 2015

Memory crapping out is my guess. I had similar symptoms with my BIL's computer, particularly the confusing multiplicity of symptoms, and is fixed it with some new memory. Try it with one stick of RAM, then swap.
posted by Sebmojo at 9:18 PM on July 17, 2015

(the capacitors in) power supplies die after a few years, replace it.... Also on the cheaper end of the scale
posted by TheAdamist at 9:19 PM on July 17, 2015

Best answer: Yeah, it's probably mainboard, maybe one of the chips overheated or something.
posted by kschang at 11:14 PM on July 17, 2015

Response by poster: I've done a little more testing and at this point I feel like the CPU / mobo is the only thing I can't rule out. Honestly after gaming a little with the 390 I was considering doing a motherboard + cpu upgrade anyway, since my 6300 seems to be really showing its age with modern games and the AM3+ socket is done for at this point.

I wasn't exactly hoping to be forced into an upgrade by a hardware failure, but so it goes in the world of custom PC's , ah well.

Thanks all for the advice!
posted by ajax287 at 6:49 AM on July 18, 2015