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[Tabris]

OK, so I have this computer that's shutting itself down (sudden, like power is just severed quickly.) after any intensive use (ex: having photoshop, internet explorer, winamp and outlook open at the same time). Infact, after it's powered down, the light at the front still stays on for a little bit after dieing. So the motherboard still has a bit of power when it happens.

I swapped out PSU's to check if that's the problem, it happened on the other PSU.

So I'm thinking it's the CPU fan (processor is over-heating thus motherboard is doing a hard shut down), but whenever I check the hardware monitor, all temps are in the early 30 range. Do you think it's the CPU fan or something different?

Bad ram would give an error beep on load right? Bad Hard Drive would be making clicking noises right?

 

[sefskillz]

but whenever I check the hardware monitor, all temps are in the early 30 range. What do you recommend?

your bios hardware monitor? or are you running software that checks it constantly while you're running this heavy load? first thing that i thought of when reading the problem was that it is overheating.

 

[Nerevar]

I had a very similar problem, and it turned out it was the motherboard. Someone told me that a lot of the capacitors sold to major motherboard manufacturers at the time I built mine were defective, and sure enough, when I took a close look at the capacitors lots of them had a brown substance leaking from them, similar to battery acid. Might want to check that. If that fails, run a lot of DOS-based stress tests that stress only 1 part of your system (the only one I remember running is memtest or memtest86, I believe, but there are ones for the processor and hard drive too) to isolate what part of your system is failing.

 

[tagrat]

I'm having a very similar problem. I switched out power supplies and it did the same thing. Tried swapping a lot of other components as well. I've been monitoring my CPU temperature under load and it doesn't seem to be overheating at all. My friend and I, we both feel pretty confident in our diagnosing skills, think that there is some weird error with the motherboard. We can't think of it being any thing else really, not that it couldn't be though. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Tabris]

Does it also sound like the motherboard might be shorting-out? Maybe I should take it out and put it back in, making sure nothing could be shorting it out.. I can also re-"heating compound" the processor while I'm at it.

 

[tagrat]

It's possible that the board could be shorting out, but unless you've been banging your case around I doubt that anything has come undone and shorted something out. Most likely both of our motherboards just have something that went wrong, perhaps those capacitors are faulty as stated before. I've been wanting an upgrade anyways so I'm gonna buy an Asus A7V880 from newegg.com for $66. I'm also going to get an Athlon XP 2500+ with a Barton core and bump it up some. My system should be a lot faster. Now all I need is a new video card, I'm still running a Radeon 8500 = (