snowzsan

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Jun 9, 2011
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Current Build:
Core 2 Quad Q6600 OC'ed to 3.6GHz
6GB G-skill PC2-6400 RAM (x2 1GB / x2 2GB)
Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD
1TB Hitachi HDD
Sapphire Radeon HD 7850
Gigabyte UD3R MoBo
Rosewill Value 2 650W PSU (I know, I know. Already ordered a new one. Build wasn't supposed to go this far.)

So recently I purchase the Sapphire Radeon HD 7850 to replace my Sapphire Radeon HD 5770. As soon as I plugged it in I formatted and perform a fresh install of Windows 7 (planned on doing it for a while) and all of a sudden a lot of features I had before don't work. Besides that, since using this new card my computer (after updating drivers) began hanging on restart sitting on "Shutting down" for about 8 hours (went to work, didn't realize) and after which refused to start up.

Blah blah blah, after countless system restores and reinstallations of Windows, I finally found out that it was the sound driver for the GPU and the onboard were conflicting. Fixed that by disabling the GPU sound. Then it was the onboard ethernet driver. Then it started to refuse to wake up from sleep mode. I would press space bar to wake the computer up and it would start up, no screen image, and shut down, and loop like that in 5 second intervals until I shut the power off on the PSU itself and restarted the computer.

Reinstalled Windows one more time for a fresh start and slowly did everything one by one, restarting when the PC asked, and after reviewing the power options figured out that even when I turned off hibernation and sleep, there was still an option hidden in the power settings where it'd shut down the SSD after 20 minutes of inactivity. Stopped that and haven't had issues since.

So overall I'm just wondering... What could have been the culprit over all?
 

snowzsan

Distinguished
Jun 9, 2011
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18,690
While it could be an option that the MoBo is dying, I would be hardpressed to say it's because of age because overall, it's not that old. All components in the computer itself have been well maintained. No rounding caps, heatspreaders and pipes are always clean and well maintained. Overall, I couldn't imagine the board is failing. This issues didn't arise until the new GPU was put in. Though there is always a chance that I could have damaged the MoBo when putting in the GPU, no matter how delicate I was about it.