Freeze followed by reboot loop before BIOS

[Jiub]

Alright my problem started earlier today when my desktop froze forcing me to hard restart the thing. However when it restarted it got stuck in a reboot loop before BIOS could start up. Everything lit up and looked just like normal for about 15-20 seconds except the whole not booting BIOS thing. Then it started again so I unplugged the psu and tried to start it again.

After messing around with the restart button to make sure it wasn't stuck, it started working fine again except that BIOS mentioned something about overclocking although my cpu is not overclocked and was operating at perfectly acceptable temperatures stably. Maybe half an hour later it froze again so I started it all again. After waiting a bit and clearing the CMOS, it did work again but froze almost immediately after windows booted and the process kept on going. I haven't been able to get to BIOS since.

I checked to make sure that every thing was securely attached and that nothing could be causing a short so I am at a bit of a loss. I don't suspect the ram as I don't think it would affect the booting of BIOS and ram problems have always caused BSODs for me. I don't think it could be the hard drive either because again bios is not booting. Right now I am assuming that it is either the motherboard or the psu.I just think it is odd that for no apparent reason the psu somehow lost just enough capacity so it could start attempting to boot up for 20 seconds and then restart.

At this time I would like to mention that nothing is new in my setup and nothing outstanding has really changed recently.

My build is

core i7 920
MSI x58 pro-e motherboard
3 2Gb sticks of G.Skill 1333 DDR3 ram
560 ti video card
X-power pro 650w psu

 

[Xttony]

There might be a problem with your ram card voltage specs. I faced a similar problem like yours a lot of times.

Try this out

1. There might be a clear cmos switch on your motherboard. If it is there press it, it will clear your bios/cmos setting. If there is no switch you can remove the bios battery then reinstall the battery in its place.

2. Then use only one ram card and reboot it.(use all 3 cards one by one)

3. If the system boots up, then your ram cards might have different operating voltages. In this case buy ram cards with all rams cards having same operating voltages, same version, same operating frequency.

 

[Jiub]

All of my ram sticks are all the same and nothing has happened that would cause such a change I would think. If one of them went dead I would assume that there would have been signs over time but there have been none. Of course I am not an expert so feel free to fill me in if I am missing something.

 

[Xttony]

Did you try to reset the bios settings?