When a computer just decides to not work...

[Sly Fox]

Hey, this is going to a bit of a long post, mainly because I want to make sure to go into all the proper details. Just a warning.

I recently replaced a dead Gigabyte 965p with a brand new EVGA 680i board. I also got a Zalman CNPS9500 to replace my Tuniq Tower (yes I know, a travesty. I just didn't want such a heavy cooler anymore though). So I get everything setup and boot her up. No problems, everything runs smooth and the whole system seems fully stable.

I run Orthos for a couple hours at 3.0 ghz (25% OC) just for a quick stability check and dont' have any problems. So I presume that all is well and that replacing the old mobo has fixed any issues. There's just one problem.

When I put on the Zalman cooler I had some trouble and ended up with the thermal paste application being half-assed at best. So I decide after the system being up for about 36 hours to reseat the heatsink properly. So I take out the CPU and heatsink, throughly clean them off with 91% rubbing alcohol, and put them back in properly.

Cool, this should drop my temps a fair bit, right? Well it did, when I booted into Vista my temps were a good 3 to 4 degrees lower, success! About 2 minutes into that first boot up though the system just randomly shuts down. Odd... but... who knows, probably not a big deal. So I turn her back on, load default bios settings and go back to stock CPU speeds. Boot back into Vista.

I run Orthos for 15 minutes while monitoring the volts/temps with Ntune just to see if there is an obvious stability problem. Nope, cool, so I reboot to put my OC back on. I'm not a big OC guy, so I like to keep my OC's really conservative and safe.

I unlink the FSB and memory, set the FSB at 1333 (the 680i is designed to run that by default anyways), the memory at 800 mhz (default speed), and that puts the e6600 at 3.0 ghz. Same OC I had before, I know this CPU can do 3.2 easily, but I like to keep the voltages nice and low.

Reboot. Boots into Vista, and I start to run some Orthos. It goes for about 2 minutes no problem seems good when *boop*.

Oh damn... the system just randomly turned off again.

I turn it back on, and I get NO video output at all. The error LCD thingy that 680i's have shows "--". That's not even a legit error code according to the manual. So that's a bad sign... I check all the internal cabling and connections and everything seems just fine. Nothing to short anything and nothing left unplugged that should be.

I then took out the CMOS battery and left it out overnight to make sure that the CMOS was reset. That takes me to just now. I put it back and in and tried to boot, optimistic that this would solve the issue. Well... same exact thing... "--" in the error code and no video output or beeps/whistles at all. Just... fans running and lights going up.

So I'm left now comletely dumbfounded. I have no idea at all what could have done this or why. I consider myself reasonably experienced and very careful, yet my system seems to have decided to put a curse upon itself for some reason.

I type up all this in the hopes that perhaps someone wiser and more knowledgeable than I will be able to help me. So if you've made it through all these details, thank you.

[dengyong]

more info please system specs and voltage settings.
try running on one stick of memory.

[Sly Fox]

more info please system specs and voltage settings.
try running on one stick of memory.

I was running 1.85 volts on the memory (G.SKILL recommends this voltage), 1.45 on the CPU which after vdroop was around ~1.41, and all the other voltages were stock.

I had the chipset fan installed on the mobo just to make sure it stayed cool, and a Zalman CNPS9500 on the CPU with AS5.

I've tried all 4 sticks in different slots and it didn't do anything.

This is actually the second time something like this has happened (hence why I got this new motherboard at all), so I'm thinking it COULD be my PSU. Like, it's just randomly frying motherboards. I might RMA both the PSU and motherboard if I can't figure this out.

Thanks.