PC starting up and turning off

asteldian

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Apr 23, 2010
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Hi all,
My brothers PC seems to have gone bad on him. I don't know the exact details as I have not gone over there to look myself (so have not yet been able to do any troubleshooting), when I do I may be able to identify the problem easily, but until then I was hoping I may be able to get some ideas thrown at me.

The symptom is simple:
He turns the PC on, it starts going through its checks then switches off. He mentioned 2 green lights, 3 red which off the top of my head made me think about the CPU as ther are 4 or 5 lights by it I believe.

Worth noting, that after the symptom began, after a long break, the PC was able to turn on again fully though it turned off in 30 mins. Has me thinking there may be an overheating issue.
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It is not much to go on, but if anyone can throw in what they believe may be the problem based on similar experiences of a PC turning on but turning off again during 'check phase'.
Worth noting that the PC is not new and so it is not a case of anything having been installed incorrectly.

At the moment i am suspecting a CPU/cooling issue, the PC is a few years old, perhaps the heatsink is loose or a replacement of thermal paste is required.

My other thought is perhaps the PSU is starting to fail. It is a few years old and I cannot remember what PSU was put inside but I don't think it was particularly high quality.

But I could be way off.


Off the top of my head the system is:
E8400
GTX 460
GIgabyte (can't remember model)
G Skill DDR3 RAM
500gb Samsung HDD
Asus Cooler (or possibly Hyper 212)
PSU 650W


Thanks for any suggestions!
 

npsgaming

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Mar 31, 2009
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I am agreeing with your ideas for causes. I would suspect if the cooler hasn't been removed and cleaned that is a good starting point. Can you get into the BIOS to check the machines "Pc Health" or something similar? While not super accurate it can lead you further down the road to a solution. Also what kind of PSU is it and how old? PSUs do start to lose efficiency after about 3-4 years on average. Budget friendly ones will decay faster and that is a fairly power hungry gpu. Also check for those dust bunnies :p they do like to get inside the fins of heatsinks and sometimes canned air or a compressor will not free them.
 

asteldian

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Thanks for the reply. PC won't get as far as BIOS now. Literally turns on starts checks and shuts down.

The PSU must be at least 3 years old and I would not say it was high quality.

An update I have had from my brother is that over the weekend the PC froze during gaming and the PC had to be manually turned off, it then worked again after turning on. This happened twice on the weekend, then again Monday before this problem occurred. When it managed to come on and last 30 mins, it once again froze and had to be turned off manually. This suggests to me that the CPU overheating is not the issue as I would expect that to actually shut the PC down to protect itself.
 

npsgaming

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That sounds logical. I would recommend pulling the system completely apart. Remove the heatsink and thoroughly clean the cpu and heatsink surfaces. Then reseat the cpu and reapply paste etc. Power it up outside the case on a piece of cardboard (or similar) and see what happens. It could also be the motherboard possibly the northbridge going bad.