Spare PC not booting

[scottyman]

Hi chaps - I decided to boot up my spare PC this morning, but all the fans spin for about a second then shut down - then again after a pause, then again for slightly longer - then it shuts down
I suspect it's the motherboard as it had been misbehaving for a while, but I don't have any good way of testing.
It's a really old i7-860 on a P7P55M mobo, so even the PSU is not quite interchangeable with my regular PC
I don't particularly want to shell out extra cash on testing - but even disconnecting practically everything doesn't get it to boot - so I suspect it's either the ancient Mobo or the quite recent PSU (which was only replaced last year)
What would be the best way to test off the top of your collective heads?

[tribaljet]

Hello there. I recently had a similar issue on my desktop and I also suspected of both motherboard and PSU, which I then found out the latter was the culprit (6 months old high quality unit, but was unlucky to get a lemon). I would suggest you test the PSU on another computer and stress test the system to see if the PSU handles the load.

Hope you find out what's going on with that system of yours soon

[scottyman]

thanks tribaljet -
It's a bit of a pain, especially since the only reason I powered the old pc up again was to look through some old backups! I had a long time ago decided to shift all of my old HDDs into one chassis, so I wouldn't have to dig through external drives

[Millennium]

Can you remove a RAM stick and try it? Sounds a bit like a RAM (DIMM) problem.

[scottyman]

I'll give that a try now - I'd only tried with both channels enabled - but forgot to try a single. Will let you know.