So some people may remember this thread, in which (iirc) I describe the first problem (My Power supply was DOA), and the second problem (which, admittedly was my own stupid fault).

But now I have a third problem with my homebuilt computer and frankly i'm losing patience with the thing. To explain:

Since the last thread, no problems seemed to appear for about a week and a half. After that, I went home for several months. And now, I have returned to university where upon my attempting to use my computer, it worked perfectly... for about an hour. Then it restarted. Restarted as in "you just turned it off at the wall then back on again quickly" restarted. No blue screen of death, no warning, no apparant consequences beyond the readily presumed triggering of a state of apoplexy within me.

A second symptom of the malady of silicon that I should list, I have been forced to observe (at great length) that sometimes my computer will not start, but instead get into a restarting loop without even a chance to get into the BIOS, with nothing displayed on screen. Bizarrely, nothing that I do seems to have any influence on fixing this. The best strategy has become to walk away and leave it for a few hours, and subsequently it is quite likely to have decided to enable me to return to the usual status quo of simply restarting once every hour or two.

Once again, the restarts appear utterly unrelated to load or temperature on the computer. Judging from the lack of BSOD, I would assume that it is not a driver issue but rather something physically wrong. Additionally, when it gets into a restart loop, the CPU fan does not spin up, but the case fans do.

My admittedly somewhat anger-driven response at this point is to hang the whole thing and RMA the motherboard, but I figured I might as well post here first in order to try and get any advice in case someone had encountered some similar situation previously.

tl;dr: My computer may be broken, i'm annoyed, should I RMA my mobo.

Either fluke chance of a series of bad PSUs, or you have a really bad mains supply and that's killing your stuff.

Honestly it sounds like your getting a BSOD, especially if your getting restart loops. The problem is that microsoft in all their brilliance (and their claim when XP came out that you won't see BSODs anymore) added a flag to the system settings that causes instant restart in the event of BSODs... Less than helpful if your trying to actually troubleshoot something.

To turn that off and see if it is a BSOD your having do the following:
WinXP:
- Right click on My Computer, open Properties
- Click on the Advanced Tab
- Under "Startup & Recovery" click Settings
- Uncheck the "Automatically Restart" checkbox

WinVista & Win7:
- Open Control Panel (Icons not category mode) & open System
(Right clicking on "Computer" and going to properties will still do this but not everyone has the desktop icon now)
- Click on the link for "Advanced System Settings"
- Under "Startup & Recovery" click Settings
- Uncheck the "Automatically Restart" checkbox

That will make it so you will know if its a BSOD (as it will no longer reboot automatically) and allow you to write down the STOP code (annoyingly long list of numbers) and the driver files it will sometimes list. You can usually google the code/driver name to find out what is generating the BSOD.

If it still does the rebooting with no BSOD than its probobly a hardware failure with the MB, Processor, or Processor cooling (The case may not be hot but the heatsink/grease may no longer be pulling enough heat from the core). Either of those will cause auto reboots either because a massive fault caused an interrupt or the processor will shut down due to heat and continue cycling until you leave it to let the core cool back down.

Ah, I should have mentioned I had already disabled the BSOD restart stupidity.
Additionally, since the crashes are not affected by the load the computer is under (as many in firefox as league of legends as crysis), i'm presuming it isn't a problem with heat.



If that were the case, what could I get to potentially fix it?

In the case of bad mains, you would want to get a power filter of some sort. A decent UPS would do the trick.

Is there some way of testing if your mains is dodgy? I don't really want to splash out on a ups if it turns out the problem was with the motherboard.

Additionally, would a dodgy power source cause the issue with sometimes getting into a reboot loop? Or is that most likely caused by damage from a dodgy mains, in which case would you recommend RMA'ing the motherboard and buying a ups...?

Do you run any sort of air conditioner or high-power appliance off the same circuit as your computer? that can cause fluctuations in voltage. Perhaps you notice your lights dim from time to time. You could test it with a voltmeter, but you might have to set there for a while before you saw any changes.

Honestly, I recommend a UPS to anyone with a half decent computer that they care about, if only as insurance against power outages due to lightning, fallen trees, nuclear meltdown, etc.



Never presume anything if it can be easily tested.

Nipples is right. Also, when considering the circuit... things in other rooms or even other dorms (assuming you're living on campus or something) could be in there too. Makes it rather hard to gauge.