Need clarification that my motherboard is dying.

porgorg

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Hi, over the past few weeks I've been getting all sorts of PC problems and I'm sure it's the MB but can't seem to prove it. I'll try and be as brief as I can.

The system was freezing up every so often and was becoming more regular. I was also getting freezes on boot up and hangs in the BIOS.
Also getting weird artifacting in the BIOS, see the screen shots.
After a BSOD involving the memory, I memtested and discovered one was faulty. Had it replaced (thanks Corsair) with two new sticks. Memtested all four and all were fine.

Then the freezes started again. Thought it might be the SSD but found the machine even froze from a bootable CD of Linux Mint.
Memtested the individual sticks, there was one (the new one of a pair that I received as replacement) that caused Memtest to crash twice, no errors found, just crashed.

I was finding the North/Southbridge heatsinks, RAM and SSD were all getting pretty hot too. Touchable hot but on the verge of too hot to touch for very long.
I tried a different PSU but still the same freezes.

I had a PSU cable short out the system too, it wouldn't boot while attached to the SSD but to the HDD it was okay.

Now the PC, at boot, can't find either SSD or HDD. It comes up with the message 'No device Found' and 'AHCI BIOS not installed'. It can read from a CD but the storage devices aren't seen on boot in the BIOS.

I'm sure it's the MB as everything seems to be showing faults, I'm worried if I keep trying to fix it it'll end up killing all the other supposed good components.

Thanks, any advice appreciated.
 

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I had a PSU cable short out the system too, it wouldn't boot while attached to the SSD but to the HDD(WD) it was okay.
I think this short out may have killed my drives.
After getting hold of another motherboard and an HDD(Green), the SSD (M4) and HDD(WD) still aren't appearing in the BIOS. I've tried power cycling the SSD (as Crucial descibe) but it's not working. As for the HDD(WD), would some recovery software possibly be able to revive it?
 
The board is toast if that's what it looks like when your in BIOS...

Note the garbled text near the red bar, and missing text that should be present beside channel 0 master...
 
Thanks, I did reflash the BIOS with the latest firmware (it had the latest anyway) and it cleared up the missing text and other nonsense I was having.

One RAM stick is causing freezes as the others seem okay. I might just dump the board anyway as I'm sure it destroyed the drives. The HDD(WD) can't be found by any software and gets too hot to touch when connected and I still can't wake/discover the M4 SSD either after multiple power cycles.
 
Can you plug the HDD/SSD into another system to make sure they can still be recognized in general?
 
Yeah, I tried them both in another system, BIOS, Windows and CD software, and they're just not being recognised.
 
Sounds like one of a few or all possible things have happened. First, a bad PSU sending improper voltages (too high or too low of a certain voltage area can cause bad things) to the board and devices can cause all of this. Unstable voltages to the RAM can cause crashing. Freezing and crashing can be caused by the RAM going bad as well. Second, heat buildup caused said PSU to start going bad and the devices themselves too which caused a snowball effect. Third, you have really bad luck.
 
Thanks PP Mguire, I'd like to think that the motherboard started it by killing the RAM and then messed with the voltages which killed the drives.
The PSU and GFX card still work in another machine so I'm hoping I can keep these and test them on a free, guinea pig machine in the future. If that messes up then I'll know it wasn't just the board that was at fault.
 
The motherboard has nothing to do with voltages of the PSU, the PSU knows (or should) how to maintain the proper voltage...
I had a PSU cable short out the system too, it wouldn't boot while attached to the SSD but to the HDD it was okay.

That could have very well been what fried your drives, and not the motherboard... That could also have been what caused the corrupted firmware for the motherboard.
 
c0rr0sive said:
That could have very well been what fried your drives, and not the motherboard... That could also have been what caused the corrupted firmware for the motherboard.
Oh :silent: ... so is there anyway I could test the PSU to prove it's the cause of all this? It's about five years old and past it's warranty. A Thermaltake Toughpower XT 575W. It has those lights on the side which are supposed to show what state it's in, they've always been green but I suppose they don't mean squat in reality.
 
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