Possible cause of severe PC slowdown/ freezing

My just over 2 old years hiper PSU failed just recently and I've replaced it with a seasonic x900. My PC works fine mostly, but since changing the PSU I've had an intermittent fault in that my PC slows down to less than a crawl, so bad it takes minutes to respond to a mouse click. If I reboot it will sometimes be fine or it might take and age to boot into XP and even the BIOS screens can be slow. I've been trying to find the apparent hardware fault, undone my overclocks, reseated cards and RAM. I even thought maybe my CPU HSF might be failing. The only thing I've been able to find wrong is on the main motherboard power connection:

http://photos-b.ak.facebook.com/phot...99093_3076.jpg

Sorry about the blurry image, my camera has a faulty flash. As you might be able to see, one of the connectors in the plug was out of it's proper seating. Could this be the cause?

I think you know the answer to this. That is not good. Never seen it on the motherboard connector before, but other connectors are not hard to push back in snugly. Unplug it first though.

I did push the pin back in. It's been OK since so seems that was it. Seems like poor quality control to me and it's a quality make as well.

Don't get me started on Hiper PSUs. My one and only failed days after the year warranty ran out, with a nasty smell of burning (luckily it didn't take out any of my other components). Not that I'd have used the warranty, I never want another Hiper again!

I'm hoping for better from the seasonic.

It started doing it again today, several times after several days of being fine. So, it was nothing to do with the pin in the power connection. Can anyone give me a clue? Is it likely to be a fault with my new seasonic? I should maybe make a thread in the scan care section of this forum as that's where the PSU came from.

Well the only way to confirm that it's the Seasonic (or not) is to try a different PSU. Is there one you could borrow?

If we remove the Seasonic from the equation then it's difficult to see what it could be. Without the fact that you say even the BIOS is slow I would suspect the HDD, either hardware or more likely Trojan. But I've never seen a slow to load BIOS before.

You might try clearing the CMOS. I'm one of those who like to not only move the jumper, but also remove the battery for 5 minutes. Also you've reseated stuff, but did you also make sure that all cables were firmly attached?

Outside these suggestions can you say more about what happens when you get the slowdown, e.g. are you doing a hard reboot when you reboot (i.e. switching the machine off), are you turning off the PSU as well? Will the problem cure itself if you leave it long enough?

I'd like to say RMA the PSU, but as the fault is intermittent it is difficult to test.

By all means post on Scan Care, it can't do any harm!

Hopefully the hiper psu will be returned soon, either repaired or replaced, as I sent it back under warranty, so I can try that later.

As for when it happens, it seems to first occur a short time after turning on the PC. Either it will slow down before the OS has finished loading, so the progress bar moves very slow/almost not at all and I give up after 10 or 20 mins and turn it off before the OS has loaded as it's taking so long. Or it might happen after booting up and browsing a few webpages and then it becomes like I imagine running XP on a 386 would be like, so I'll click on shutdown an 10 mins later it will turn off. Sometimes the BIOS screen will be up for much longer than the ~1s that is normal for this machine and at that stage if I hit the del key and go into the BIOS everything will appear normal, but be alot slower than normal although the BIOS shows the CPU at normal speed and the full 2048 ram and normal temps and voltages in the hardware monitoring, which makes me think it must be a hardware fault, but what I have no idea.

Now, it will keep being like that every thime I reboot until I decide to open up the case and try reseating cables, components or maybe just peering inside and saying 'what the f is wrong with you?' and then when I close it up and power up thing will be fine for a time, days even. Until it happens again.

I'm not sure what might be wrong with a hdd, I tried reseating the power and data cables on both drives and doing full scans which reported no errors. I'll try scanning for trojans just now, in case maybe it's that, even if it seems unlikely.

Any ideas anyone?

I was getting similar problems with my old PC. Sometimes it would take up to 15 minutes just to boot. The screen would be corrupted as well and the system was non-responsive. I put this down to a faulty motherboard as it later developed a problem of not recognising the CPU.

So, the hiper PSU may have killed my motherboard? Great.

I wonder if they will consider compensating me? My guess is not. Even though surely the PSU should be designed to protect the other parts of the PC.

Hmm Maybe I should have posted this in the appropriate forum, Help - technical & advisory?

I think T&A is a relatively new forum. Most people seem to post problems here. And if the new Hiper doesn't cure your problem the mobo would be a suspect. It can stop any of the other components working properly.

But it's worth trying to eliminate memory from the equation. Easiest way is to try 1 stick at a time. Memory can certainly be at fault in intermittent problems.

I thought it might be the memory at first, but I ran memtest86 from a bootable cd for a few hours and there were no errors. I've swapped my ram into the other slots just in case and it's been fine today.

That suggests that maybe the mobo memory slots, or connecting lines, that are at fault.

It may just start doing it again of course.