Unfortunaltely it is currently at a tech place, it has taken them 3 days of testing to say they think it is the mobo. They said they tried a dif processor and reapplied thermal paste, and a dif power supply, same results. I don't have any of hte componants, all of the upgrades and repairs were done at tech shops. Sorry bout the make and model thought I had all of that printed out, but I have been unable to find it. They haven't said anything about the chipset, are you talking about the processor?
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by: dethbyltPosted on 2009-08-25 at 11:45:08ID: 25180799
Yes. At a glance, it sounds like you may have a heat problem with the CPU or the chipset. When the PC comes on and sometimes is OK, but most times is not, heat is a prime suspect. If this is the case, I would suspect that the times it works, the item in question just happens to make enough contact with the heat spreader responsible for keeping it cool. the other possibility is that the motherboard or one of the connected devices is going bad.
Did it start crashing immediately after the installation of a certain upgrade you mentioned?
Some steps to take to troubleshoot:
1. Verify that all of the system fans are running.
2. Verify that the CPU, and both the north and south bridge have a solid connection to the heat sinks for the device. Make sure that there is a sufficient amount of thermal paste, no more than a BB's worth, connecting each.
3. Verify that the CPU fan is properly mounted and not loose.
4. Replace the RAM with the older RAM and see if the crashes happen.
5. If so, replace the hard drive with the older drive and see if the crashes happen.
If none of the above lead to a positive result, the motherboard may be bad despite appearances. There can be cracked traces of silicon, bad chips, or even a bad resistor that you may not ever see just looking at the board.
If you can post the make and model of your motherboard, I can look at some specific diagnostic tools for that device if you want.