OT PC "Crashing"

Duckie

Duckie

SOH-CM-2024
I Posted this on the support forum but sometimes it gets very slow over there so thought I would float this here too.

Here's the situation. Recently my PC started crashing. Here are the symptoms. Doesn't matter what activity, screen goes black, no messages, power is still up and all fans still running except GPU fan shuts down, after a few seconds "SIGNAL LOST" displays on black screen and monitor goes to "sleep mode", almost immediately the PC begins a reboot.

This happed once about 6 months ago and didn't happen again until just before Christmas. Now it happens several times per session (3-4hours) and sometimes the reboot will not complete before the above cycle starts again.

Could this be the boot drive failing? Thoughts, suggestions?

System:
XP Home SP3
3GB DDR3
850W Corsair PS
ASUS P6TSD Motherboard
Intel i7 920
ATI x4870HD Extreme 1GB
100 GB 7200RPM SATA boot drive for windows and a few others only

2 ea 250 GB 7200RPM SATA HDD for all other programs including FS and graphics.


Thanks Steve
 
Could this be the boot drive failing?
Click to expand...
I don't think so ...
after a few seconds "SIGNAL LOST" displays
Click to expand...
Indicate nothing coming from your graphic card to the monitor (same will show if you unplug the cable between your monitor and graphic card)
except GPU fan shuts down
Click to expand...
That's the most important symptom (IMHO)
Can be a problem of power to the GPU fan or problem of power to graphic card or a mechanical problem with the fan (IMHO again)
Will be nice to monitor the GPU fan speed with some software .. as speedfan or other ..
http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
for check if speed (or temp) fluctuations ... before he stop ..
I suggest you to take care to not burn your graphic card ! (it can be some graphic card items destroyed if they have too much temp)
I suppose some others will give some more advices ...
Good luck
 
My first recommendation would be to clean your graphics card's heat sink:
  1. Unplug PC's power cord and then press power button to completely discharge it.
  2. Unplug and remove card from the PC.
  3. Blow/vacuum everywhere you can get access. If there's a shroud you can remove safely, do so. Be careful not to overspeed the fan when using compressed air.
  4. While you have it open, clean out the processor's cooler and the northbridge fan (if equipped) too.
  5. Put everything back together in reverse order.
  6. Double check all connections before you plug in the power and reboot.
 
Sounds like the video card is getting hot. Do you have a GPU temp monitor?

I use software named Real Temp.

Tom's advice sounds solid as well.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll check the vid card. I do have temp monitors. It rarely exceeds 48 C. It has a dedicated fan with a separate fan speed control which I keep locked on high. CPU and MB rarely get to 40 C.

Also taking a look at the power supply at the suggestion of Ickie on the support forum.

Man, and it's 351 days til Christmas!
 
I will then add that having maintained 150 PC's at a time for 13 years, you might just break open the case (unplug and discharge first) and re-seat all the cables and RAM, and blow it out. That cured a lot of ills for me over the years.

And once back together, if you have a BIOS function to do a hard drive and RAM test, and any other tests, run them.
 
Milton Shupe said:
I will then add that having maintained 150 PC's at a time for 13 years, you might just break open the case (unplug and discharge first) and re-seat all the cables and RAM, and blow it out. That cured a lot of ills for me over the years.

And once back together, if you have a BIOS function to do a hard drive and RAM test, and any other tests, run them.
Click to expand...

Thanks Milton. Reseated all the cables and replaced the Ps cable last weekend after giving it a can of air. Will will do the vid card and reseat it and the RAM tomorrow. Don't know much about BIOS tests for HDD and RAM but will see what I can find on that too.
 
This might be naive but don't all PCs have an intrinsic graphic card? Would it be diagnostic to DC the addon card, boot up and run the PC for awhile to see if the crashing stops? The only times I had the no signal issue was when my kid tried to feed the TV a signal from my PC to watch Finding Nemo or something. What happened is that the PC detected 2 monitors and chose the "new" TV one as the preferred. When I went to boot up and that monitor wasn't found anymore, she had disconnected the cable, it took some noodling until I got a picture back to un-do the setting.
 
Thanks aeromedical, but my motherboard doesn't have an on board graphics processor. I think if the problem persists after the work today I'm gonna look real hard at the power supply.

The more I think about it the more I looking in that direction, mainly because it usually begins these shut down cycles within a minute or two of my first boot up.

Anyway, off the hangar to the ops shack to tear down my PC! :wavey:
 
This is just my gut feeling on this, so don't take it as gospel. Milton and Tom have excellent suggestions, by all means try them. If you still have the problem after going through all of the tasks they have suggested, then your problem may be a more serious one.... the Mother Board. Reason I say this is because I had the very same thing happen with one of my XP machines. The problem at first was very infrequent, the screen would go black but the hardware seemed fine. A reboot would fix the problem and it only happened once or twice. Six months later the same problem popped up and it became a regular occurance, 3 - 4 times every day, no matter what application.

I tried pretty much the same routines that Milton and Tom suggested but to no avail. I finally took the machine to a friend who had alot more technical expertise and diagnostic equipment than I did and after a week, I got the bad news. The Mother Board was "shorting out" and causing the video card to momentarily stop working... which resulted in a "Signal Lost" error messsage to show up. I kid you not. After a series of "Black Screens" eventually the errors resulted in a "Blue Screen" with affected IRQ and the 16 digit location in the registry listed.

I'm not saying that this is your problem, Duckie. Just that your problem sounds ALOT like the one I had. BTW, this machine was a custom built PC that I put together back in 2001, it was replaced in 2011 so I got my money's worth out of it.

BB686:USA-flag:
 
Thanks BB686. Yeah, I hear you, had that in the back of my mind also, and have already been pricing key components; PS, Vid Card, and MoBo.

Just completed the tear down and build back. Not a whole lotta dust but what there was is gone. The box has screen filters for all the intake fans and I clean those regularly, removed and reseated video card and RAM, unplugged and reconnected all points, 5 SATA drives and popwer connectors, 6 fans, and 2 mainboard power connectors. Did some cable reorganization too.

No problems on 1st boot, but only time will tell.

I turly appreciate the comments and suggestions from everyone. All were very helpful, and were good gut checks. :salute:
 
Duckie said:
Thanks BB686. Yeah, I hear you, had that in the back of my mind also, and have already been pricing key components; PS, Vid Card, and MoBo.

Just completed the tear down and build back. Not a whole lotta dust but what there was is gone. The box has screen filters for all the intake fans and I clean those regularly, removed and reseated video card and RAM, unplugged and reconnected all points, 5 SATA drives and popwer connectors, 6 fans, and 2 mainboard power connectors. Did some cable reorganization too.

No problems on 1st boot, but only time will tell.

I turly appreciate the comments and suggestions from everyone. All were very helpful, and were good gut checks. :salute:
Click to expand...

Yes, you have to go though the basics steps first to eliminate those possibilities. Ultimately though, sometimes it is the big one.
 
Duckie said:
...my motherboard doesn't have an on board graphics processor.
Click to expand...

Just a side note... I'd be greatly surprised if this is completely true, although I have no idea what mobo you have. Virtually all of them have onboard video, even if it's only analog. My networking classroom just got brand new Dell machines that would absolutely scream (8GB RAM and 1TB HDD's) if not for the mediocre graphics cards installed in them. The cards have digital and HDMI outputs, and there's a small cap on the mobo's analog video port. My guess is that the onboard analog video is disabled in the BIOS.
 
Tom Clayton said:
Just a side note... I'd be greatly surprised if this is completely true, although I have no idea what mobo you have. Virtually all of them have onboard video, even if it's only analog. My networking classroom just got brand new Dell machines that would absolutely scream (8GB RAM and 1TB HDD's) if not for the mediocre graphics cards installed in them. The cards have digital and HDMI outputs, and there's a small cap on the mobo's analog video port. My guess is that the onboard analog video is disabled in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

Could very well be. I know just enough to be dangerous (and costly if not careful! :icon_lol:) There is just no spec for onboard graphics or native video ports on the ASUS P6T SE that I could find. No where to plug a monitor in except into the video card so I made a dangerous assumption about no onboard video.
 
I stand corrected - your board has no onboard video! I guess there's a first time for everything...
 
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