Previously functioning system stopped working.

[rocksjudas]

Ok, so I built a system for myself about 6-7 months ago with the following specs (non OC):
Core 2 Duo E6700
MSI P965 Platinum
Crucial 667 DDR2, 3-3-3-12
Antec Basiq PS Dual rail 500W
Nvidia 7900GS

It ran pretty well until yesterday. I decided to shut down the system for the night and while shutting down it shut off very suddenly. I was sleepy and didn't think too much about it, but this morning it won't startup properly.

The system itself starts to power up, all the fans are running as well as the hard drives. But I noticed it does not send the reset signal to devices. i.e. the keyboard lights do not blink on, and the monitor does not power up.

Does this mean the motherboard is screwed? Any tips or suggestions on how to troubleshoot and what could be wrong?

Thanks!

 

[rocksjudas]

Ok, so I did some more digging this morning. (MSI P965 users make some suggestions please).

I connected the D-bracket that came with the motherboard and read the LED settings it displayed against those indicated by the m/b troubleshooting manual. The LED settings indicated that my memory was damaged. (I was running crucial 667 MHz at 3-3-3-12 performance settings). So I removed one of the sticks (I had 2x1GB) and sure enough it POSTed and went to the BIOS screen.

Now here is the strange part. I assumed that at least this one stick worked. I changed the BIOS setting to make it SPD instead of my 3-3-3-12 timings and rebooted and it stopped POSTing! Now again the LED settings show that the remaining lone stick is also damaged???!!! WTF? I tried both the sticks by themselves in a single slot and neither works!

BTW in retrospect, it may very well be a memory problem because I was getting "not able to access memory at address 0xxxxxxxxx" kinda errors lately with IE. But since these errors happened ONLY with IE and with no other application I assumed it was IE that was screwing up. Seems I *may* have been mistaken.

Crucial memory users (the blue heatspreader ones) are you having any problems with this memory? Also guys, should I assume it is a memory issue and not some m/b issue? I mean after all it could still be a m/b issue while reading memory right?

 

[rocksjudas]

Ahh, feels so good to have it working again. Ok, can someone please suggest good memory test utilities now?

I have a lone memory stick working right now, I also bumped down the voltage about 0.2 volts and set the memory manually to least strict timings.

I'd like to test the damn thing now to make sure it works ok.

Any good suggestions on memory test utilities? Thanks. (Please don't make me talk to myself again ).

 

[akhilles]

http://www.memtest.org/

 

[rocksjudas]

Thanks much!