PSU or MB issue?

[teflon2287]

Hi, I have been a follower of THG for a long time, but I am new to the forums. I have a fair bit of experience on building my own PCs.

I would like to ask for some advise on one of my PCs...

I have a Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 (AM2) running BIOS "FHL", I built this PC in Jan 2008 with an Ahtlon 62 X2 6000 CPU, but a few months ago I upgraded the CPU to a Phenom II 945. Which was a nice upgrade for the cost.

The RAM is Corsair 4x 1GB 800MHz DDR2, with an ATI HD3870 video card. I think the PSU is a 450 watt Antec thing.

This system has been working great before and after the CPU upgrade. But now, sometimes (more and more often), when I try to boot it up, I press the power button, and the light all come on for 0.5 secs, and the fans start, but it doesn't turn on. Sometimes it will come on after a few attempts, but some times I have to wait a couple of hours, then try again, and it will work. Once it does finally turn on, it works great, no problems at all.

I didn't think the new CPU should have caused this, since the new one has a TDP of 95w, while the old one was 125w.....

Now, I have decided that this is most likely the MB, but I was thinking that it could also be the PSU... What do you guys think?

Thank you very much for your advice.

Dan

 

[masterasia]

I had a computer with similar symptoms before. I swapped, out everything. I rma'd the ram, motherboard, PSU, and video. Still the same problems. Then swapped the CPU with some cheapie Sempron and it booted up. I quickly rma'd the CPU and that finally fixed it.

 

[ebaca]

I have the same problem also. I posted the below in the motherboards thread:


Ok, this is wierd. I built a new system about 6 months ago. I used an ASROCK P55 with an i5-750 installed. All has been running great! It is blazing fast and takes anything I throw at it. About a month ago I started to get a recurring problem. I am not sure if it started a month ago or earlier because, I am lazy and keep my box running 24/7 most of the time. Now when I shut it down and try to cold boot most of the time the power and fans come on and the CDROM fire up but the board will not post. I even check the led on the motherboard called Dr. Debug and no codes show. It's almost as if the motherboard is not on. The drive access light stays solid.

Now basically if I turn it off or unplug the power and wait a minute or two it fires up just fine. When it fires up, I get no errors and the machine runs like a dream as always. It is as stable as a rock when it is running. This is getting frustrating and happens almost every time. I have updated the firmware and no luck. I also unplugged my SSD and still no luck. I am afraid it is a problem that is starting and will get worse as time passes.

Any ideas on what it may be? Below is my build:

ASROCK P55 PRO
i5-750 Processor
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2000 (PC3 16000) F3-16000CL9D-4GBRH
COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
OCZ StealthXStream OCZ700SXS 700W PSU
SAPPHIRE 100258-1GHDMI Radeon HD 4850 1GB
Corsair P128 128GB SSD
Logitech G510 Gaming keyboard
Razer Naga Mouse
Microsoft Windows 7 64bit

 

[teflon2287]

In my case, both my MB and PSU are circa Jan 2008, which is part of the reason I suspected one of those two parts.... Most of the other stuff in my system is much newer, except for the videocard....

I am at work at the moment (I live in Australia), when I get home I will try another PSU and see what happens, if I have no luck with that, I guess I will buy a new MB (and hence new RAM too, since I only have DDR2 ram)...

 

[danyulc]

Thanks for your post!

Currently I'm running the same Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 motherboard as you are. I built my system in Dec 07.

2GB Corsaid DDR2 4-4-4-12 @ 2.1v but running in standard settings at 1.8v
Athlon x2 5200+ 65w energy efficient CPU
EVGA 8800GT 512MB

Recently, I started looking into computer hardware and I've decided to upgrade the CPU and buy a Phenom II x4 945 @ 95w. Which is currently the fastest CPU available which is also on Gigabyte's approved CPU list.

So in anticipation of this upgrade I flashed from the FE bios which I was running to the latest FHL bios. Everything seems to work fine now, but, when I turn the computer on it takes a good 10 seconds or so in the bios before the machine finally posts and then boots as normal. Nothing happens for a good 8-10 seconds until finally you here the beep, the monitor gets a signal and things start.

In addition, when attempting to turn the computer back on after suspending last night it never reloaded back into windows. It just sat there with a blank screen so I eventually rebooted. I used to be able to suspend/resume as long as the sytem wasn't OC'd.

What is weird about this is I've yet to change a single piece of hardware on the computer since building it in Dec 07. The only issue I ever had before this was when performing a cold boot the bios would pause a little on the drive detection part at the very beginning. The computer would then boot up maybe 50% of the time without problems. The other times, it would hang during XP64 startup with a BSOD.

That problem has existed since first building the computer. By pushing the reset button after powering on the mobo the problem is avoided and everything works just fine. At least until I performed the FHL bios update about 2 days ago. I was too lazy to RMA the motherboard when I initially built the system because the issue was minor and everything else worked perfectly.

Does anybody have any idea what the FHL bios issue could be? I initially thought it might have just been a necessary step to enable Phenom II support. However, it seems more likely this is some sort of bug or hardware issue. I had noticed that it seemed like something to do with the last line before the bios turns things over to software. About DMI data being updated or some such. There was an option in bios for 'Auto' or 'Enable' about not allowing anything to touch that area. It seems like the times when it fails to boot properly after a cold boot its because bios is improperly preventing access or something. Took me almost 2 years to see that though because the sentence flashes off the screen so quickly. You only really notice it when it says 'success' after overclocking or some such because it pauses for a moment so you can read it.

Anyways, Everything else still works w/o issue. Gaming/Computing and such are all rock solid. I did update to the FHL bios via the Windows bios update utility, which probably was not the best idea, but, I was feeling lazy at that time.

I might try to re-flash and see if things improve. Any ideas are very welcome though! Thanks!

 

[danyulc]

One last note, I've seen a couple other people with the same GA-M57SLI-S4 Rev2 motherboard on FHL bios mentioning the longer boot up or post time after updating their bios. So it might just be the way it is on FHL bios.

It wasn't really a concern for me either, until the computer failed to resume from suspend. Although I don't use that feature a ton, it would be nice if it worked.

-Danyulc

 

[Onus]

ebaca, if you've already posted your issue, please do not hijack this thread.
I don't remember when Antec last built a 450W PSU, so it must be an old one. The old Antecs, iirc, had the bad capacitor problem that plagued a lot of components.
If the other PSU solves your problem, that could be it.
If it doesn't...reset your CMOS to defaults, then go in and disable anything you aren't using, like legacy ports, floppy (unless you use one), IR interface, or anything else that the BIOS may be waiting to "time out" before it proceeds in the boot process.
Check for blown and/or leaking capacitors on the mobo, although I think by 2008 this problem may have pretty much disappeared, especially for a brand like Gigabyte. Google "bad capacitors" for some images of what they look like, though it should be pretty obvious.

 

[teflon2287]

Hey thanks for the help guys.

I ended up testing the PSU with a spare, but I had to run it without some hard disks etc because I the spare I have is a cheapo one, but the computer booted up fine with no problems.

@jtt283, the PSU was purchased in Jan 2008, but it is still under warranty... I think the MB is fine though. Thanks for the advice!

@Danyulc, When I decided to flash the BIOS in preperation for that very same CPU you are considering, I used the @bios program of gigabyte's, and it flashed it to FHL after it downloaded it off the net. Then I has some issues similar to what you are describing... So I flashed back to an earlier version and it seemed to fix it. So I donloaded BIOS version FHL from the "Asia" mirror (Which is the closest to me anyway) and flashed it using the one that I downloaded. Since then I have had no problems. I don't know if this helps you.

Dan

 

[teflon2287]

Also, forgot to mention, although it seems to work fine for me, Gigabyte does have the FHL version BIOS listed as "BETA"....

 

[teflon2287]

Best answer selected by teflon2287.

 

[Onus]

Glad to help. Hopefully you'll be able to get it working properly, quickly.

 

[danyulc]

Thanks for that extra info Teflon, I'm going to reflash through the q-flash bios utility or whatever it is called. I also have a different FHL bios I d/l off of rapidshare that has SLIC in it, but, I'm not quite sure its a good idea to flash that.

I also found ppl mentioning a FHm bios that Gigabyte support sent out at least a few months ago. It has never been posted to the website, but, apparently existed to solve an incompatibility issue with our specific mobo and ATI 5770 I believe.

Until the FHm bios was used ppl with those new ATI cards would just here several clicks on boot up, which would take 30 secs or more to start. If it even booted up at all, I'm not sure exactly.

I e-mailed somebody to try and obtain a copy of it, in case I decide to upgrade to a new ATI card. I'll post back here if I get a copy of it, probably just u/l to a file sharing site or some such. Although I'd be wary of using it unless you're having the specific issue which it is intended to solve. Not really you specifically, but, YOU out there lurking!

Thanks!

-Danyulc

Btw: Phenom II x4 945 gets here on Saturday 10/16 , woot! Definitely will give me the juice I need to go back and play GTA4 and some other games. Could play them before, but, only had 2GB ram then and gta4 had issues under XP64.

 

[teflon2287]

Thanks jtt283, got a new PSU in the mail today, and have it all working now!

No problem Danyulc, I don't have a 5770, so I can't comment on that, I am happy with the 3870 I am running now. I hope you get your 945 working too, mine was a really nice upgrade from my old Athlon 64 x2 6000. Even at the same clockspeed, single threaded programs are much faster, plus I now have 4 cores to play with!

Good luck!