Saturday, June 12, 2010

Dead computer

10:00 PM / Technology / Comments12 Comments

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My lovely new computer, less than six weeks old, died yesterday.

First, to set the stage, I decided I wasn't happy with the temperature inside my old Antec Sonata III case. That case was designed with noise suppression in mind first and foremost, and was extremely limited in terms of cooling, having only a single case fan and no ventilation whatsoever. Heat would just sort of accumulate inside it and have nowhere to go... not good when you're running a Core i7 and a beefy video card. I decided to replace the case with a butt-ugly but feature-rich Coolermaster HAF 932, which is larger than the Sonata III and has an insane number of super-huge fans, blowing cool air over all the components inside it. It arrived yesterday, and I promptly carted everything upstairs, where I would have more light and room to manoeuvre.

The build didn't take particularly long, and I had everything put together and looking rather tidy thanks to the case's cable management system in just over an hour. At this point, I closed the side door, plugged it into the wall, hit the power switch and everything kicked into gear. "Great," I thought and, after setting my boot drive priorities in the BIOS, powered it off and hoiked it back downstairs.

It wouldn't turn on. Or rather, it would turn on and the fans would spin up, but then it would cut out after a second or so, before trying to spin up again, only to fail once again. Rinse and repeat in an endless cycle until I yanked the power cable out.

Over the course of the evening, I tore the whole thing apart and put it back together bit by bit, trying to isolate the problem. At first I thought perhaps it might be short circuiting, or that some component or other had become unseated. Nothing I tried managed to fix the problem, however, with it failing to boot even with the device sitting outside the case (to eliminate the possibility that it was shorting out on something) and only the bare minimum components - CPU and heatsink - plugged in. I've tried removing the CMOS battery, I've tried manually resetting the BIOS using the jumpers on the board, I've even removed and reseated my CPU and heatsink, but to no avail.

Basically, the problem can only be the CPU or the motherboard, and my gut instinct is telling me that the motherboard has somehow been bricked. How that could have happened in the process of carrying it down a couple of flights of stairs, I don't know, but there you have it. The only semi-plausible explanation I can come up with it that something went wrong when the BIOS updated itself after I changed the device boot priorities.

Whatever the reason, I'm basically stuck with a rather expensive doorstop. The CPU and motherboard were both ordered separately, so it's not as if I can return them both to the same place and have them figure out where the problem lies. I THINK it's the motherboard, but I can't be sure. My first course of action is going to be to take the matter up with the motherboard supplier, and see what happens from there. Luckily, I hadn't got around to selling my old system yet, so I'm currently able to use it. I'm not happy at all, though, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Fucking computers.

What I should be using right now.

What I should be using right now.

 
12 Comments

1. Kram Sacul said:

Fucking computers indeed. Well, at least something crapped out now instead of later at a more critical time. What about the power supply?

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 12:26 AM)

2. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Tried it with my old power supply too - no dice.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 12:28 AM)

3. ChuckZ said:

Fooking Prawns!

Seriously, though, if you think it's your mobo, call your manufacturer's customer support line. I called up Gigabyte one time when I was having trouble isolating a problem and the guy stayed on the line with me for 45 minutes until we got it resolved. Let me them figure out what's wrong.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 3:11 AM)

4. bosque said:

How long do they last these days ? Admittedly I only buy what appears to be called a "Tower" - i.e. a desk-top PC minus the monitor - but my last two purchases have lasted less than 4 years, 15 months and 2 years 4 months both unable to boot outside the guarantee. So I'm on the third PC inside 4 years.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 5:38 AM)

5. tw said:

Damn, that really sucks, Mike. I guess I've been lucky with the same tower Dell PC since 2002 and no failures yet. I do need an upgrade bad though.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 9:08 AM)

6. MCP said:

No beeping sound and coloured led blinking sequence that might give some hint? At work my latest PC failure was solved thanks to this kind of autodiagnosis and it was bad RAM.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 1:38 PM)

7. Author Profile Page Michael said:

MCP:

Nothing at all, just silence.

I've more or less eliminated the CPU, RAM and BIOS as the problem, though. I spoke to a moderator on the ASUS support forum, who said that if I was getting the same results with the EATX12V power supply connection removed (which I was), then it couldn't possibly be any of these that was causing the power to cut out, as they wouldn't be able to run.

I've started a support ticket with ASUS and am waiting for them to get back to me. Hopefully it'll be a simple case of me sending it back to them for a repair/replacement.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 5:04 PM)

8. Anonymous said:

Neat! We're using the exact same Cooler Master case. That thing dropped temps a good 6~8 degrees compared to my old midtower, so once you actually get it up and running I think you'll be pretty happy with it.

I never had problems with the look of the HAF 932, but bear in mind I was running in an NZXT Guardian 921 case prior. (Rust red, just like the MS-06S ZAKU II.)

Good luck with ASUS and getting your rig back up and running.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 8:14 PM)

9. Kentai said:

(The Anon above would be me.)

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 8:15 PM)

10. Author Profile Page Michael said:

Kentai:

To be fair it's not THAT ugly - it's just a sort of running joke my brother and I have about the poor taste most PC case designers seem to have. Auzentech sells some REAL grotesqueries.

By the way, do you know if there's any way of disabling the red LED on the front fan? If I'm watching a movie in the dark and have to leave the system on for some reason, I can imagine having it lighting up the whole room getting annoying pretty fast.

(Posted on Sunday, June 13, 2010 at 10:16 PM)

11. Kentai said:

It took me a minute to even figure out that the bulbous growth in front of that case was a DVD-ROM. I can only guess it was designed with that elusive Construction Equipment Fetishist in mind?

The LED in the HAF 932 front fan can't be turned off, no - or if it can, I'm not certain how. I think you can just pop the front fan assembly out and replace it, though it seems that 230mm fans are less common than, say, 250mm. I'm not sure if a larger fan would fit or not.

(Posted on Monday, June 14, 2010 at 12:05 AM)

12. Bleddyn Williams said:

Sorry to hear of your problems!

I'm a mac user and had a Power Computing model (in the brief window years ago when Apple actually let other manufacturers make macs) which was DOA.

An iMac bought years ago had rippling on the screen out of the box. This turned out to be magnetic interference from one of the speakers - in it went for a change out.

My last iMac didn't work properly when I got it home. Back the next day for replacement.

As you say, fucking computers.

Loved the Auzentech link. Truly hideous unless you love your computers having "Tonka" written on them.

(Posted on Monday, June 14, 2010 at 5:05 PM)

 
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