Serious computer problem.

[HeeRoMaKi]

Alright here goes this is going to be long but me(not knowing to much about computer hardware), and my friends who do build their own computers so mostly know what their talking about but..we are all at a loss..so here goes.

My computer randomly shuts off, not freezing, not rebooting, shutting itself down during start up, randomly at desktop.. anytime.. random can't find a pattern besides the new issue that it turns off while trying to play a game. Now my problem used to be just that I had a hard time turning the computer on. To get my computer to turn on, i have to hold in the reset button to keep the power flowing long enough the computer will ATTEMPT to boot up, sometimes this takes quite a few trys but it used to be, when i got it running, it would stay on. The change now is that when I boot up a game, it's a shutdown. so I can no longer play games at all, because the pc shuts itself down. Now on what we have tried to fix this problem. We first, got a new power supply, but it did nothing to help so we returned it and pluged the old one back in. 450w, the one we tried, was 550w. This is a new mobo and video card (yes, the problem happened with the previous mobo and video card, same exact problem, no change) I have taken out each ram, one by one, no change, I ran memtest, got to 100% no errors. Removed the video card thinking maybe both cards were messed up, but no change. Now, this is where it gets..weird when we got to the steps of taken out the harddrives, I have two hardrives, a c drive 40gb and a d drive 60gb. When the cdrive is not pluged into the power, the computer WILL start up without the reset button being held in so we thought we figured it out.. BUT after a while the computer will still shut itself off again! When we desicoverd this, i of course, attemtped with JUST the cdrive in the computer and couldn't get it to power on without the reset button pushed in, so my cdrive hd is DEFFIENTLY making it harder. so the only progress we have made is, cdrive bad, ddrive will boot up with power button but shutoff after a while of just sitting at the mobo screen(because windows is on cdrive so we can't play around in windows) so that's what we discoverd so far. ...but what the **** else is there?! I've even swaped out ribbon cables, I unplugged both cd drives so it only ran on the ddrive, but that still shut it down, we used just 1 brand new ribbon cord, from mobo, 1 harddrive 1 cd drive...still no improvement, I even jumped the computer on by myself (used a screwdriver to connect the powerswitch pins) and it would STILL shut itself off. what else is there? anyone have an idea? and.. I'm poor and just can't buy a new computer for proably a LONG time.. so it would be a nice help if someone could tell me what the problem is causer.. i got about $70 i can use, which would be ok for a new hd but.. we don't think it's the hd's since problem still occores even though the cdrive def makes it worse/harder to turn on. so what else is there ... could a proccessor being doing this? when it shuts off, we even tried to feel around for something hot on the mobo, but even the proccessor heat sink was very cool to touch. ..please give us an idea? how can we test a proccessor besides buying a new one? ..or if anyones willing to help me out in a donation to buy me a new computer i'd love that! lol. ..so does anyone.. have an idea?

[jayhawker01]

Are you overclocking at all? Reset the processor. reset the bios. boot to safe mode and see if it happens.

[HeeRoMaKi]

Originally Posted by jayhawker01

Are you overclocking at all? Reset the processor. reset the bios. boot to safe mode and see if it happens.

No, though I do once in a while lately get a message durring boot up under the bios where it says hit delete or f12, it will say overclocking failed..something after that but always flys by to quick to read, only seen it like 3 times, but i'm not purposely overclocking anything except my videocard is a 7600 GT OC which i guess comes out of the box overclocked? but keep in mind my old videocard was a 6600gt not oc'd and still had this problem,

but i don't know to much about computers myself, how do i reset a processor and reset bios?

here are my specs
Windows XP home SP2

AMD 64 processor 3200+ 2.01GHZ 1.00gb of ram
Videocard geforce 258mb 7600 GT OC
no sound card
Motherboard: MSI nforce4 standard chipset K8N Neo4-f 939 socket

anything else need to know let me know

[phucng_10]

Alright let's get this straight:

Computer shuts down randomly while booting a game.
Holds reset button down to supposedly "warm up" the computer.
Tried switching power supplies but it was still having the same problem.
Took out RAM's one by one and ran a Memtest, 100% error free.
Removed both VGA but nothing went wrong.
2 HDD, 1 40GB and 1 60GB.
Plugging in the 60GB will power up the computer for a certain amount of time.
Computer shuts off once again.
Swap cables, and removed optical drives.
Problem still occurring.

Well, this seems to be your motherboard's problem then. It could be that there is a defect in the motherboard that is causing this problem which automatically shuts down your computer.

[HeeRoMaKi]

Originally Posted by phucng_10

Alright let's get this straight:

Computer shuts down randomly while booting a game.
Holds reset button down to supposedly "warm up" the computer.
Tried switching power supplies but it was still having the same problem.
Took out RAM's one by one and ran a Memtest, 100% error free.
Removed both VGA but nothing went wrong.
2 HDD, 1 40GB and 1 60GB.
Plugging in the 60GB will power up the computer for a certain amount of time.
Computer shuts off once again.
Swap cables, and removed optical drives.
Problem still occurring.

Well, this seems to be your motherboard's problem then. It could be that there is a defect in the motherboard that is causing this problem which automatically shuts down your computer.

You would think that, but this is the NEW motherboard, this is a differnt motherboard then the motherboard that the problem orginally was on. and yes, everything you said was correct. except the computer will sometimes shut down durring desktop and startup too, i don't always get to try a game, but everytime i try a game it shuts down, i USED to be able to at least play games cause the problem was geting the computer on, but now it worsend to this

[phucng_10]

Originally Posted by HeeRoMaKi

You would think that, but this is the NEW motherboard, this is a differnt motherboard then the motherboard that the problem orginally was on. and yes, everything you said was correct. except the computer will sometimes shut down durring desktop and startup too, i don't always get to try a game, but everytime i try a game it shuts down, i USED to be able to at least play games cause the problem was geting the computer on, but now it worsend to this

You didn't state that you had a new motherboard. Anyways, so running a game shuts down your computer, lets see. Is your computer decently ventilated with a intake and exhaust fan? Have you tried checking the temperatures of your components? Maybe it's overheating. You can also check your BIOS to see if you have the Shutdown Temperature and Warning Temperature enabled.

[HeeRoMaKi]

I said I got a new mobo and new videocard but.. was a lot to read ;P but yes anyways uhm I can check that I myself and a bit new too messing with computers this way but after messing with computer i've learned quite a lot all because of this problem lol, i don't believe my mobo came with a temp warning but I will go check the bios and see, we have tried to touch the mobo and heatsink after a shut down to feel for heat, but nothing at all seems warm we could touch everything, the ram, heatsink, also i have 3 fans, 1 back panal fan, a front fan, and a fan on the sides, but right now the computer is open due to all the testing.. and such as this has been a problem for about 5 days now.

[HeeRoMaKi]

The only thing i could find in bios was

System temp: 32c
CPU temp: 32c

system fan speed: 3200rpm
CPU Fan: 0 rpm
Northbridge fan speed: 5900rpm i don't know if any of this helps but it's all i could find about temp, looked in all the options all i could really find about tempeture. never found it saying shut down when temp reaches.. this temp or nothing like that

[phucng_10]

Have you tried checking to see if there is one intake fan [takes in cool air] and one exhaust fan [pushes out hot air]?

[phucng_10]

That's pretty weird. Are those idle temperatures?