Help! My computer is randomly rebooting!

[keung]

[Lineage]

My vote is the motherboard. My buddy had an assload of problems with his i5 pc for a long time, and changing out different components seemed to do absolutely nothing. New video card (gts 250 to a radeon 6770), new ram (offbrand to corsair), psu (upped wattage), etc.. until finally the only thing left was the motherboard. Replaced it with a newegg special with half the features and lo and behold the thing is rock solid now, with all the old components or the new ones.

I also had a problem on my old p4 with bulging capacitors on the mb, it would blue screen seemingly at random. Could have been 5 minutes after getting into XP or during a game or sitting idle for 4 hours, just random as fuck. Had to scrap that machine completely, RIP.

[Morpheus]

the only time my pc was fucking up with reboots and errors were: the power supply and RAM...

[zein]

you may want to try with the PSU (power supply unit) before changing the motherboard

[Sauron]

Considering you swapped practically every component but the motherboard, that seems like the safest bet as the cause of your issue. Did you monitor core temperatures? Overheating can cause random reboots and I didn't see anything in your post about monitoring temps. Download CoreTemp and keep an eye on it. Post your cold boot temps (turn off your machine for ~30 min and then reboot) and your 100% load temps for ~10 min of continuous running. What kind of CPU cooler do you have?

If, after testing, temps don't seem to be a problem, I would just cut your losses and try a new mobo. At best it fixes your problem, at worst you need to return the new mobo.

[Sauron]

I would also note that I didn't see you post about trying a fresh OS install either. That might be worse a go-around. Perhaps toss on another OS (dual boot) and see if the problem persists there.

[Lineage]

[Lineage]

[InfamousRaider]

This was happening to me too a few years ago, ended up being the power supply.

[keung]

Tried another PSU already, was not the cause of the reboots. This happened in Win7 also, but the symptom was freezing instead of rebooting. It's unpossibal to find an X58 motherboard at a reasonable price these days. The cheapest motherboard I could find in Norway is an ASUS PX58-E at $400! A bit too much to spend on for testing purposes. I can't believe how pricey these boards are, but I guess it's because vendors wants to exploit people like me desperate for a rare board.... Fuckers.

[blade]

Did you try resetting bios to default settings and try running?

[keung]

Yep, I've tried both Fail Safe settings and Optimized settings, neither works

[Finalz]

rip out your cmos battery and put it back in place and see if that works.

[Lineage]

Once you run out of components to change and if default and/or tweaked settings don't fix the problem you basically have to point at the mobo..and it sounds cheaper to find a new chip+mobo combo sale than to pick up a new board for that chip. Depends on how bad you want a rig that doesn't freeze/reboot/act possessed I suppose.

[Sam]

Check your CPU temps (check in your bios or get coretemp). Also goto control panel, system, advanced, settings then uncheck automatically restart. This way instead of rebooting you will get a blue screen and get error code. You should also see it in the event viewer.

[chicken-]

[Sam]

It's why he should check CPU temp cause if it's overheating then it will reboot. It should show the temps in the bios. I have never seen a motherboard being cause of the computer rebooting unless you got leaking capacitors or bios needs to be flashed. It's CPU or power supply (he already swapped it with working one i think).

[TimTim]

I'll second what lineage and sauron said. Given the nature of the problem and everything you've already tried, either something's gone bad on the motherboard or it's overheating or both (the latter possibly a result of the former).

It sounds like it could be a bad capacitor, so if you're really, really lucky, you might be able to take a look at every capacitor on the board and see if any look damaged (the top will be "popped"). If that's the case, get a soldering iron if you don't have one and replace each damaged capacitor with one of the same capacitance/rating. It should only cost a few bucks.

Again, you'd be pretty lucky if it was something as simple as damaged capacitor(s). And that's not to say the damaged capacitor isn't a result of a damaged diode or something, in which case, to properly replace that, you'd need the board's circuit diagram and a multimeter to isolate the damaged components. And if you don't know what you're doing there, might as well cut your losses and shell out the money for a brand new board. I will say that sometimes manufacturers put cheaper components in their boards knowing they'll work well enough for a while but they'll die after a year or so. So if you do get lucky and it is a capacitor or two, you might as well shell out a couple extra bucks for higher quality capacitors and possibly add more years onto the board so you don't run into the issue again.

[Sonic|^]

[blade]

[TimTim]

[keung]

[Diff`lx]

Likely:

A - The Motherboard.

B - The PSU. The PSU you said you tried replacing your old one with was a much less powerful PSU. Depending how much juice your rig requires you may want to try a PSU with similar power to your old one (except less old).

May want to check CPU and Mobo temps as well.

[kud]

Re-setting the cpu comes to mind. I once had reboots (overheating) for this reason. Your OP didn't mention trying this.

[keung]

I'm going to try to re-seat the cpu and in the process re-apply thermal paste. When I tried a lower power PSU I didn't use alot of components, so I'm pretty sure it didn't require much power. I found an X58 on ebay from China at a decent price (~£100). If re-seating the CPU doesn't help I'll see if I can't order a new board from that ebayer.