Arrrgh, Please help - My PC has exploded!

[Gr44]

Okay, 'exploded' might be taking things a little out of context, but.....

I was surfing the interwebs about 30 minutes ago when my mouse and keyboard both went dead, no lights on them etc. I still had a display and it looked like stuff was still running on the PC.

I rebooted it, the PC turned on but the monitor wouldn't come back - powersave and the keyboard and mouse were both dead (no lights).

Anyone know what this could be? Not easy to reseat things as it's a heavily watercooled PC and yes, I've looked for leaks and can't see anything - water levels are where I'd expect too.

PC is a Asus P5K with a Q6600 and 4x 1GB sticks with an 8800Ultra.

Thanks in advance!

Sean

[Infinite]

Something died in there. Do hard drives spin up when u turn it on?

[Infinite]

Me thinks it is probably the motherboad.

[Gr44]

Yeah HDD's spin up, fans come on etc.

I'm fairly sure it's the motherboard too. I took all the RAM modules out and it doesn't error with any beeps or anything so I don't think it's even getting to POST.

Do'h

Wonder what caused it... nothing has changed for a month or so...

[Infinite]

motherboard just fail generally. i went to uni in september and came back at christmas, so during this time my computer wasnt used/ even plug in. When i came to turn it on, the motherboard just randomly broke.

[lego batman]

Yeah, the way it doesn't register anything you plug into it does hint motherboard to me

PS Sorry for your loss

[Thorsson]

Could be PSU or CPU I think. I've seen failed PSUs turn on fans & lights before, and equally a burnt out CPU would prevent boot but wouldn't stop fans/disks powering up.

[peterb]

A power spike could have taken out the PSU - particularly if it is a low quality one (what make is it?) which then took out something on the mobo.

[GoNz0]

its an enermax 720w looking at his specs, try pulling the cards as well incase ones come loose, also do a battery out and bios reset to rule that out. if they fail then it could be the mobo and RMA is an option unless you have a spare psu to test with ?

[Blackmage]

its an enermax 720w looking at his specs, try pulling the cards as well incase ones come loose, also do a battery out and bios reset to rule that out. if they fail then it could be the mobo and RMA is an option unless you have a spare psu to test with ?

This and try 1 stick of ram in all the slots.

[Gr44]

Thanks for the suggestions, will try them today when I get my ass out of bed and let you know what happens ;-)

Yes, It's an Eneremax 720w, it's plugged into a surge protector as well - so I doub't that's it but I'll try the one from my other PC if it's a possibility!

[Gr44]

Well, tried a few things this morning.

I reset the bios again - can't easily take the battery out because it's behind the GPU and too many watercooling tubes over that!

I tried using a differant RAM module in slot #1 only and same problem (did this last night too)

Then I tried a RAM module in slot #3 and I got life!!

Kind of wierd though, the mouse and keyboard were both dead when it got into windows but then it seemed to find the drivers and power them on. When I typed in my password it was asking for drivers for the onboard wireless controller and some other device (don't know what). So it seems to have lost some information or something...

Oh, also after POST I obviously got the usual Bios error you get after clearing it so I reset everything to default to rule out overclocking as the cause.

I'm heading off out now but I'll try sticking some more RAM modules in later on and see what happens!

Big thanks to all the suggestions, I was on the verdge of emptying the W/C loops last night and ripping the motherboard out!

[GoNz0]

might have a bad memory socket, and the crash has caused major driver corruption causing the driver found issues.

i would chkdsk once you get back in

[Gr44]

Thanks for the heads up GoNz0, just ran chkdsk and it didn't appear to find any faults.

Right, I've located the source of all these problems now I think. It's 1 faulty RAM module - motherboard appears to be fine with the 3 modules remaining working in any configuration!

I'm so relived, really wasn't looking forward to all the work invovled with replacing the motherboard (has 2x mosfet waterblocks, notherbridge, cpu, gpu, 2 rads, 2 res's)

Thanks you very, very, very much for all the advice. As I said I really was on the verdge of ripping the thing apart last night (I even put up a post to sell parts of it on CPC... I'd better take it down!)

Mucho Thanks everyone!

[how1]

Watercooling!! All the hassle with changing things if anything goes wrong!! yikes!

[Cov]

WOW, can I have a thanks as well, lol ?

only joking ...