Well because your PC is rebooting even in the BIOS I still think it's hardware, sorry I posted the disk check link twice (Updated now).
Can you run Prime95 in safe mode, that will help us rule out a software issue.
Well you can try running your laptop on battery and see if it reboots (charge it when you go to sleep or when it's off).
Run SeaTools as requested earlier as I've updated the link.
I'll run Prime95 from safe mode. By the way, it's not a laptop. It's a full PC - I built it around 3 years ago - it's the first PC I've built. It's always run fine until this started happening.
Out of curiosity, could it possibly be the hard drive? If it happens even during bios configuration and memtest off a cd, wouldn't that rule out the hard drive? Can I run seatools safely while I'm having this reboot issue? What if it reboots during the scan? As I said earlier, once before I ran a checkdisk on my hard drive and it rebooted mid-way, causing all sorts of boot issues for me. I'm scared to chance it again.
Another thought - on another forum, I read that really there's only 3 ways a PC can reboot/shutdown without a bluescreen:
- PSU shuts down
- CPU shuts down
- Motherboard shuts down?
Is this accurate? If so, then I guess this narrows it down quite a bit.
I did have to disconnect my modular power supply connectors briefly many months ago. I'm wondering, when I reconnected them - maybe I accidentally swapped out a couple of the plugs? Some of the modular connectors are unique plugs and some share the same type so they can be swapped from one plug to another. I wonder if somehow I switched connectors when screwing them back in and now I've got too many amps running on a single rail? Last night my PC rebooted just idling, so it's not like it had a heavy load. During the Prime95 test this afternoon my APC battery backup said the load was 467 watts. Currently, just browsing and downloading, it's drawing 315 watts (of course these numbers include my LCD monitor, router, etc, which is all running through my battery backup). With my monitor off the battery backup reads 280 watts currently. That's with 4 hard drives in my PC and a GTX 570 video card. This is my power supply:
XION Supernova XON-800R14N 800W
http://www.performance-pcs.com/catal...ducts_id=26182
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817190016
I'm leaning more and more towards the power supply being bad. But I really have no experience in PC's other than what I've taught myself. Another note of interest - I read this earlier today on a forum:
"If you need to leave the PC for a few minutes before a reboot will work, this is also a strong indicator of a PSU problem."
I have noticed that often my PC will go into "fits" of multiple reboots in a row, as it did earlier today. It rebooted, and rebooted again while loading the bios, and again while I was in the bios. I notice if I leave it off for a few moments before restarting, especially if it's going through a series of reboots, it seems to be more likely to start up without issues.
Last edited by tgfyhre; 25 Apr 2014 at 23:27.
I'm afraid hardware testing is one of those things where you have to take a risk and buy the hardware to see if that fixes it.
From what you've described the PSU seems faulty and a replacement looks needed.
Well I ran Prime95 today. I ran it for 3 hours straight on the top test option (max cpu, no ram). It ran fine for 3 hours straight with no errors. I then decided to run furmark to see how that would go while Prime95 was still running. It's been about an hour now with both running - 4 hours total for Prime95 and 1 hour with furmark. With both my cpu and video card maxed out, here's what I've got for numbers:
cpu
75-78 celsius (distance to TJ Max - 22-25)
80-82 celsius (distance to TJ Max - 18-20) - these 2 cores run a bit warmer than the other 2 above
Nvidia GTX 570
82-83 celsius, 84%-85% fan speed (max fan speed for this card unless unlocked - card doesn't downclock until it hits 95 degrees)
battery backup reads around 560 watts running through it with monitor switched off. My power supply is 800 watts.
room temp - 74 degrees
I haven''t had a reboot since Friday, when I had that string of them. After the string of reboots on Friday, I disabled hyperthreading in my bios, so I use only the 4 physical cores, but kept my 3.5Gz overclock on my Core I7 920. Since I disabled hyperthreading, my temps have dropped around 10 degrees when maxed out, and I haven't had a single reboot. Of course I've gone for a few weeks without a reboot before and then it started again. And reboots have happened even at idle or using memtest in the past, so it certainly wasn't the temps that caused the reboots. But today everything seems stable with these tests. I'll run memtest+ later. Is it possible by disabling hyperthreading with my overclock I could have increased stability? My pc ran for over a year and a half with hyperthreading enabled with my overclock, but only just started acting up a few months ago.
Still wondering what this means for my power supply.
Remove all overclocking, it can cause high instability.
The thing with the overclocking is I've ran it for over a year and a half with this overclock with no issues and no reboots. As mentioned earlier I've run video encoding software with the overclock for 10-12 hours running the cpu at 100% - and never had any reboot issues. Now over the past 3 months I get these random reboots, even at idle or running memtest or even just being in the bios. Could the cpu be less tolerant over time of overclocking?
And could the overclock cause reboots during memtest and being in the bios? As I said, I disabled hyperthreading the other day and it's been good ever since. I hate to lose the overclock because that's why I bought this particular chip in the first place - I even went for a particular stepping to overclock better. It's only overclocked to 3.5 from the stock 2.6, but it seems to make a noticeable improvement in much of my software and gaming.
I will admit I don't know that much about hardware (I need to learn really).
If you want an answer I will request somebody.
If you get anymore issues let me know.
That would be helpful if you could. I still need to run my memtest+ again, but I've been really stumped trying to figure out what could be behind this. It does seem to be pointing to hardware, but my cpu/gpu tests yesterday did just fine, and there hasn't been a reboot since Friday, so I'm curious what somebody thinks about this that is familiar with hardware issues.
tgfyhre, I'll try to assist you but first, I need you to do a few things for me. I need you to fill out your system specs for me in as much detail as possible. To see more of what we would like, you can click 'my system specs' at the bottom of this post to see mine. If you click the same thing at the bottom of your last post you will have a link to edit system specs. Fill it out with as much detail as possible including manufacturer, model and size if you can. That will help us to help you and will always be available to us in any post you make. If you need help this will help you System Info - See Your System Specs
If you don't already have it, please download and install CPUz, Please post a screenshot (Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums) of the CPU, Mainboard, Memory and SPD tabs. On the SPD tabs you can select each dim slot from a dropdown list in the upper left. I only need the slots that are populated.
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