System has become unstable after 6 months

Associate
Joined
12 Feb 2011
Posts
13
ASUS M5 A97 R2.0
AMD Phenom II X6
8gb Corsair DDR3 1600mhz
KFA2 Nvidia GTX970
Samsung 500gb 850 evo
Samsung 250gb 850 evo
several disk drives
PSU: Silverstone Modular 1000 or 1200w

Hi all,
the motherboard is the newest element of the machine. It was bought 4th Jan, however the first one delivered wouldn't post so was RMA'd. Everything has been running stable, no overclock since it was finally put back together in the middle of January.

10 days ago I came back from the shops and couldn't wake the machine, Although it wasn't sleep because the fans were still spinning. Eventually I rebooted it. The same thing happened the next day, checking the log showed they were unexpected shutdowns, BSODs.

Checked bios, chipset & gfx card drivers were up to date.

They started increasing in frequency and I began monitoring temperatures (normal) and gradually removing peripherals all with no effect.

I was particularly suspicious of the USB devices as on reboot it would repeatedly fail to POST with no video, no warning beeps etc.. I pulled the usb keyboard & plugged in a ps2 one and managed to get it to boot, but further testing revealed it to be random coincidence.

However random reboots continued.

Tried SFC - which found and fixed some corrupt system files. It was more stable for about 12 hours & then became very unstable and frequently failing to POST with no warning beeps

So I pulled it onto the bench and checked all connections, power connections & that the graphics card was seated correctly.

During power up ram led would light correctly.

Then I unplugged the spinning HDDs one at a time
SMART tested the two SSDs -
Created bootable USB of Memtest86+
I then tested all four sticks, which failed, removed two (pass), test other two (fail), remove 1 (pass), test remaining stick which then also passed.

So I then tested the last stick in each of four slots. In slot 3 there where massive fails.

Thinking I had nailed it I put back 3 sticks in slots 1, 2 & 4.

Ran test again. This time it locked up 23% through the test. Tried again, same again. Then the machine refused to boot from the usb, tried twice. checked BIOS, booted to windows, usb bootfiles intact. checked event log, several hardware errors. (disk controller errors, peripheral failed to start errors)

So I get random BSODS it won't POST 4 times out of 5, memtest inconsistent, USB init inconsistent

My feeling is the motherboard has failed,

What do you think?
Is it still in warranty?
Can I RMA it?
 
Soldato
Joined
6 Jun 2008
Posts
11,618
Location
Finland
With that old CPU motherboard sure isn't new one, so trying new BIOS/RTC battery would be cheap thing to try.

And what particular model that PSU is/how old it is?
Striders have had lots of cheap capacitors in sdecondary without any cooling.
 
Associate
OP
Joined
12 Feb 2011
Posts
13
The mobo was bought new from OC in January and it doesn't exhibit battery problems.

I don't know which model the PSU is it was an insurance replacement about 4 years ago. Where I didn't discover they had replaced my thermaltake modular PSU with this, there's no model data on the visible parts and I haven't completey disassembled the machine at the moment. Waiting for a reply from OC support.
 
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