Yep, I agree,, the 3 places (in order of importance) that you should not cut corners on, are....
1. PSU (for good power generation)
2. Case style (for good cooling, doesn't matter how good the case looks if it doesn't provide good cooling) (it can have all the pretty lights in the world, but cooling is far more important)
3. Motherboard (for stability)
A wimpy supply is a headache from the start! Corsair had a good 620w model out some time back that would be adequate for that build even when you add a good video card. The OCZ 700w was selected here knowing additional hardwares like drives, tuner card, etc. would be added on later.
Forget case styles while some that see the board drop down on one side for ease of installation/removal look nice the lack of sufficient air flow or alternate liquid cooling is a major temp problem from the start there. Tepid called that one on the head!
Try moving a board out of one case that lacked even vents to one with a large front fan to see board temps drop some 15C+! Once the board temps came down the cpu and everything benefited as well.
As far as boards you have perhaps 6 or 7 top makes and even running into a bad board from one of them is always possible! Make sure you order your board through a good vendor having a good rma policy! If you should end up getting a bad board or two in model series they'll work with you on replacing with a different board or model even another make and model.
If I continue the list above I would say,,,
4. RAM (bad ram can cause data corruption among other things)
5. Hard drive (and crappy slow drive isn't going to do you any good)
6. Video Card (self explanatory)
7. CPU (it is very rare for the CPU to go bad, so you rea really looking for speed here)
8. Optical Drive (while important, these are almost a dime a dozen)
9. Keyboard and Mouse
10. Monitor (while also important, just about anything will do, however, notice that a monitor with better refresh rates [or LCD's these days with high Hz ratios] do play a part in the speed of your system. in other words, yes, actually a slow monitor can have the effect of slowing the feel of your system, it can become a bottle neck)
11. The rest are after thoughts.
4) bad ram or timings, voltage not set correctly or the board using a standard memory not performance dimms depending on make and model will be a factor to add to that.
5) WD Green Power models good for storage not OSing used mainly in 3.5" My Book external application there. The same applies to Seagate and other make external drives usually lower end series.
7) depends on whether or not you plan to oc or run stock. You can easily cook a cpu not having an adequate hsf inplace and watch temps soar as well as insufficient cooling in general. Cool the board more and watch cpu temps come down!
Each individual environment as well as the intended usage will always be a factor since that varies with each person. Those were just a few tips on things there as well.
One other thing I could recommend here since the problem is mainly seen at startup besides the supply being pulled down during the post tests where the largest draw on the supply is seen would be scheduling a run of the check disk utility with the repair switch added to see if this is an OS startup related problem.
Simply go to the Run command line if you have checked off to be displated on the Start menu there and type in "chkdsk /r" without quotes to schedule a run on the next startup. That will tend to correct any basic partition table and other logs as well as scan for bad sectors and work around them on the drive itself.
Well, looks like we have a winner.
I spent about 40 mins pulling my 650W Antec PSU out of my gaming rig and used that, after several cold start ups the failure has dissapeared with no event log warnings or issues.
Hats off to you fellas, you spotted the issue pretty quick and it took some time for me to go off and test all your ideas as the days are not my own at the moment but I had a day free this weekend which allowed me to have a proper look and as most of you had said it looks like the PSU was he culprit.
I still havent added the GPU as I halted the build at this point until satisified that the problem was sorted so Im off looking for a decent 700W+ PSU now.
Thanks again.
I've been running the OCZ GameXStream 700w for 3yrs. now. And that takes a pounding with the amount of drives run here. At the moment however newegg only has one of those instock(recertified).Newegg.com - Recertified: OCZ GameXStream OCZ700GXSSLI-B 700W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready Active PFC Power Supply
For the next build I'll likely end up with the Fatality model seen at Newegg.com - OCZ Fatal1ty OCZ700FTY 700W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply - Power Supplies
But at least you know where the problem was. This is why I was pointing out that supplies that come included with cases exspecially generic labels are generally garbage! If you are not into gaming and not looking any high performance card to start with there are plenty of good mid range to look over by both ATI and NVidia.
Like I always say,,, Power is a strange thing, with strange properties that cause strange issues.
When you have looked at all other things. Check the PSU.
I was hit by lightnening once and the system seemed fine, for a while, then it started flaking out
little did I know, the PSU had been hit and created a short at the Mobo.
None of the problems I was seeing pointed to the Power. But that was it.
When the board saw a short you had two problems not one! Someone else lately heard two beeps and no display where it became obvious the video card was toast. But even with the onboard nothing came on! The supply a weak off name 450w had done something like being pulled down too far by a short on the card or surged and cooked the card somehow. Now the board is ? with an 850w in!
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