PC rebooting every 3-5 minutes

[educatedfool]

Little bit of a problem here

Just bought a 1TB Hitachi HDD, installed it fine.

Whilst tinkering I decided to take out the graphics card and remove the heatsink to clear away the dust that had accumulated in it.

When I first booted up I had the error 'Disk failure' just after posting, this was due to the sata power of the OS drive being knocked out slightly, so that was sorted and it booted to windows after that.

In windows everything works fine for about 3 to 5 minutes, then after that it will either restart or freeze. I disconnected the new drive and the problem still occurs so my finger is pointed at the graphics card, which may have been damaged when I removed the heatsink. I made sure I was grounded and set the card on an antistatic bag whilst cleaning.

In the 5 minutes I get I checked the temps and all seemed well, the graphics card floating around 48 which is fairly normal, checked the CPU and MB temps and all was well with them too.

Specs:

AM2 6000 @ 3.0Ghz
3GB DDR2 6400 Patriot stuff
DFI CFX3200M2/G
HD 2900XT 512
Tagan Force 2 series 900W
2 x 500Gb HDD and 1 x 1TB HDD

Running Windows 7 RC, I ruled out it was a windows problem when it rebooted whilst in the Bios menu and trying to reformat.

Do you think I'll need an early christmas present of a graphics card?

[blueball]

Try removing the card and reseating it, amazing how often that fixes things - you may have blown dust from the heatsink into the PCIe slot so give it a blow while you have the card out.

[educatedfool]

Just tried it and still keeps restarting, I also disabled automatic restart in the system menu and it still keeps happening.

[Krakkenbus]

Is your fan on the GPU still spinning, forgetting to plug it in would be the sort of thing that you'd do.

[educatedfool]

Because it would boot into windows if it wasn't turned on...

[Krakkenbus]

I meant the fan on your gpu's heat sink but you said your temperatures are ok so never mind that

[sleepyhead]

Perhaps a slightly dodgy stick of RAM?

If I had a similar problem I'd (eventually) strip the PC back to just CPU, 1 stick of RAM and Video card (oh and a keyboard). Sit in BIOS and wait to see if it resets (seeing as it does it every 3-5 minutes).If it's ok, then I'd proceed to hook up a DVD drive and try memtest86+ and see what happens then. I'd try each single stick of RAM in each DIMM.

If this was me, I'd eventually find out I'd knocked a power cable slightly loose and the voltage spikes were tripping everything out.

Anyhow, just my 2p.

[educatedfool]

Managed to figure it out eventually, the Antec 900 + Tagan 2 Force II 900W leads to a spaghetti junction down in the bottom of the case. In the jumble too much was connected to one rail, creating just a little too much strain. An hour later, and an immense hatred of screws, wires and sharp bits of steel mean it's all working now

Looks like I'll be pushing this 2900xt a little further