Computer Shutting Off After Boot

[mrflint]

Hi, hopefully somebody here can offer up some advice on how to diagnose or fix this issue.

I have a desktop PC with an EVGA x58 board, i7 920, 12 gigs of Mushkin ram, 4 WD hard drives, amd 7950 gpu, evga gtx 285 gpu, 1000w Silverstone PSU. All running on windows 7... Don't think I left anything out.

Anyway, the computer, over the last day or so, has been shutting itself off. Not a clean shutdown from Windows, but simply powering off and restarting itself. It will boot into Windows, load startup programs, etc., then after about 2 or 3 minutes (sometimes less) it will simply shut off and repeat.

Before these regular shut-offs it happened once or twice the day before. A couple of times it was just my monitors that shut off (or the video card somehow lost power), but the computer stayed on.

I installed the 7950 gpu about 2 months ago and haven't had any issues with it. The mushkin ram was installed about 3 weeks ago. So there are a couple of recent additions to the system, but this problem didn't start happening until the last couple of days. This is happening while at idle as well, so nothing is under stress.

My first instinct is that it's the PSU dying, but the issue of the monitors going black makes me wonder if it could possibly be the motherboard or one of the video cards, or maybe even a problem with the power in my house or the outlet (no tripped breakers or anything though).

Not sure what to make of it and hoping somebody may have some suggestions before I go tearing things out, ordering a new power supply, etc.

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: 3/20 7:30am

Was able to boot up now without issue, after having the PC shut down all night. The power flickering and reboots have not been happening this morning. I got an AMD specific error in Windows, so reinstalled the drivers for my gpu. Shortly after that and a reboot I got a random BSoD, but didn't get a chance to jot down the stop code. Made me wonder if it was a memory issue so I tried running memtest86. The test would not even start. I pulled out the Mushkin sticks and put my older Corsair sticks in. Same situation with those as well. At this point, I'm thinking it's the motherboard. I will try the RAM in the other 3, unused slots, and see what happens there.

 

[thesupergeek]

I had this problem with my asus g75 laptop after upgrading to windows 8. my issue was some bad chipset driver, however this may not be your problem, can you check the error log and post what the error for your "dirty" shutdown is? mine was 41 kernal. also, there may be an issue with your audio drivers. check those out and make sure you only have one or the ones you need.

 

[mrflint]

I did consider updating my motherboard bios, seeing what that might do, but I'm concerned about a random shutoff in the middle of a flash. I hadn't thought of looking for updated chipset drivers though. Things had been running fine up until the last few days, so I'm not too hopeful that's the issue, but couldn't hurt to see if it makes a difference.
I will have to see if I can get into the error logs and if I'm able to I will update with that info.

In the mean time, I have a new PSU ordered so I'll see what that does when it gets here. If it's not the issue then oh well, I'll have a spare. The one I currently have is just under 4 years old, but I guess they eventually die. It's just that I have owned PSUs of lower quality in the past and they've lasted well beyond 4 years.

Thanks.

UPDATE 3/21:
Okay, computer won't boot at all at this point. I was able to get it started and running for a bit, but not enough time to fetch the error logs before it shut off again. Now it will not boot at all. Hopefully the new PSU does the trick. This time when it shut off, my printer also powered off, which is plugged into a completely separate outlet. Not sure why that would happen.

UPDATE 3/24
Okay, got a new PSU today and then came the moment of truth... It made no difference. On-board LED lit up, just like usual, but no power, no fans, no anything. I've tried it with bare minimum configuration and have gotten nothing. I think it's safe to say that my board is dead. I pulled all my hard drives and tested them via my laptop and they all seem to be working fine, hopefully I can salvage the other components.