Pc doesn't power up

[Heluris]

Hello everyone,

I was playing some game yesterday, when all of a sudden my pc shuts down. I couldn't (and still can't) power it on anymore. When I press the on button it starts for perhaps half of a second (a few lights flicker once and the fans spin for 1/4 of a turn) before powering down again. I tried clearing CMOS, removed my video-card, removed all of the cables connecting to my pc, removed all my RAM but one, and nothing worked. I'm clueless.

I have to say : When my pc was working, I was trying to fix an annoying mouse freeze (the famous one in windows 7), so I installed a couple some drivers, did some things in the registry (nothing dangerous though, just some new key concerning my mouse) and used quite a bit of USB entries for my mouse (unplug-plug-...).

I've heard hardware can react quite strange to USB stuff, but I'm confused why it doesn't even POST or give me my BIOS or something? I hope nothing's wrong, because I recently put my pc together (two months ago).

Specs (off the top of my head) :

Gigabyte PS3-UD4
GTX 460 768mb
Intel core i5-750
2x 2gig of kingston RAM
StealthXstream 650w PSU


Please help me out! Thanks!

 

[hell_storm2004]

I think your PSU died. If you can lay your hand on another PSU, hook it up and see if it starts up again.

 

[Heluris]

Alright, I haven't had the time to try another PSU, but I unplugged the 2 power connectors to my video-card and tried again. I (obviously) had no image on my screen, but now my PC started and ran for some 20 seconds before powering off again.

Is it possible my PSU can't deliver the 650w anymore, but eg. only 400w (which wouldn't be sufficient)? I gave a three-year-warranty, so I'd be glad if it were my PSU that died.

 

[Heluris]

Yep, I've narrowed the problem down to one of the two PCI-express Connectors that connect to my VGA. How stupid that it died so soon... I'll try another PSU now

 

[Heluris]

I came to some new (less fun) conclusion. Here's the situation :

PC doesn't power on anymore, except if I remove the first of the two PCI-express connectors connecting to my video-card. Obivously, I don't have any image then.

So I took another PSU, checked if it worked by jumpstarting it (it worked) and plugged in its PCI-express connector to my video-card. Didn't work.

Conclusion : Video-card died. I installed another video-card and my PC worked again. This quite sucks, because I did overclock it a bit (really not much) so I think my warranty's gone too... Thanks anyway, hell_storm!

 

[hell_storm2004]

Congratulations you spotted the trouble!

Keep this link in your bookmark:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/261145-31-perform-steps-posting-boot-video-problems