Help me please! Computer Freezes / Wont Beep @ Startup etc

[daletron]

sorry so long.. its been a frustrating few days

i THINK this all started because of the sound card i bought, the Soundblaster X-FI Xtreme Music. There's been a lot of known issues between the X-FI sound cards and NForce boards (sound crackling, some people get system reboots, i dont know what else), but decided to take my chance anyway because i play quake4 and can really use the EAX features.

it was working perfectly fine for a week and a half (only 2 times did it crackle on me) and then my computer froze to the point where i couldn't even press control alt delete... and i wasn't doing anything if i remember correctly. so after a few more freezes i just took out the sound card.

but the problems are still there... when my computer freezes, and i reboot, my computer wouldn't even "beep" or load up at all. if i'm lucky and wait about 10 minutes, i can load my computer into windows and then it'll freeze within a few minutes of doing nothing. sometimes it'll freeze in the middle of loading BIOS and just anything

so i tried a few things, tried a new power supply from best buy (True Power 650W) and no go. I have both RAM sticks in the blue slots, tried switching em around, or just left one in there, still no luck. I was using an IDE WesternDigi HD, so I bought a WesternDigi SATA HD thinkin it might be that and no go. it froze as i tried to even install Win2k

so i'm thinking it has to be the Motherboard or CPU right? the thing is, how can I tell which one it is? is there any way? What do you guys think, is it the motherboard OR the processor? maybe even my video card?

I'm hoping I can distinguish which one is the problem so I can buy either a Motherboard or a processor and dump the broken one. It'll be a real pain in the ass to lets say buy a processor, dump my old one, put in a new heatsink, thermal grease and then find out it's the motherboard that's broken... if that's the case do those thermal grease removers work well? i'm real scared bout handling processors and stuff like that

anyway i'm starting to ramble, i'm just looking for any sort of suggestions or help at all, please help me! i'm on my mom's laptop at the moment and i can't even install anything on here

ps - would Asus replace my motherboard with that 3 yr warranty thing?


i've never had any problems what so ever with my system until a week and a half into


my system 2 yrs old:

A8N-SLI Deluxe
AMD Athlon 64 3500 Clawhammer
eVGA GeForce 6800 GT
CORSAIR XMS 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)
Antec Smart Power 500W
Win2k

 

[evongugg]

Remove everything from the motherboard except the processor and 1 stick of RAM and the video card. Take it out of the case and place it on cardboard. See if it beeps and posts.
If it doesn't beep remove everything except the processor and see if it beeps.
Usually when you have it stripped down to the minimum and it still does not beep, that means you have a bad motherboard.
If you have another processor with the same number of pins (same socket), you can try replacing that to see if it solves the problem. Or else you can look for burnt marks on the processor.