[BaZZa]

Six months ago I built myself a new comp up until about 1 month ago everythings being running fine. Now it seems to have developed a power up problem. If I press the power button the system powers up for a few seconds, case fans run/light up, leds on dvd burners flash etc, water cooling fan starts then everything powers down (there is no BIOS post).

In the beginning pressing the power button once more and the system would power up okay, but over time this has become progressively worse sometimes having to press the power button 10 or more times with the same result until the system successfully powered up (but this is totally random yesterday for instance the comp powered up first time no probs)

With a good start up first the water cooling fans runs then the GPU cooler fan runs (there in no GPU when it's not gonna work) this lead me to suspect the PSU was a bit below par and not giving enough juice, or that the GPU at fault and sucking to much power. I recently discovered that if I hold the reset button in the GPU fan does run which suggests that the PSU and GPU are okay, and points more towards a mobo problem. Hopefuly I sould be able to borrow a psu and graphics card from a friend to do some tests to verify this.

Ideas anyone? I would like to pin-point this in one shot (I realise that this is not always possible) as I spent a lot of time putting this comp together (making the cabling and piping neat and tidy etc etc) so I would like to minimise the work involved fixing the problem (for instance swapping the GPU would involve removing the water cooling pump/reservior)

System Specs:
M/B - ASUS M2N32-SLi Deluxe, CPU - Athlon 64 X2 5600+, GPU - Foxconn 8800GTS 320Mb OC version, RAM - Kingston HyperX 2Gb 800Mhz DDR2 SLi ready (Daul channel), PSU - Zalman ZM600-HP 600Watt, Gigabyte Aurora 570 case with 3D Galaxy II water cooling CPU only (GPU soon hopefuly), 2 SATA Seagate Barracuda 320Gb HDD in Raid 0.

Other Stuff: Samsung SH-S182D and Liteon DH20A1P DVD writers, Procase card reader, NEC floppydrive, Trust WB-5400 webcam, Logitech X-540 5.1 speaker set, Logitech cordless click plus mouse, IIyama HM903DT B CRT monitor, Ideazon MERC Zboard gaming keyboard. Daul boot OS windos XP SP2 and Vista

[alex]

Have you tried to boot the pc in minimum psu-use/boot configuration?

Removing and leaving only one dimm, one optical etc?

On a rough estimate from the components quoted I'm not happy with your psu amps, why Zalman have put only 16a on each 12v rail is beyond me. I'd've preferred to have seen 2 12v rails with 32a each.

The card quoted requires around 26a on the 12 if memory serves. I believe that's your problem. It'll be drawing around 60w from the pci-e port but still, you're going to be short.

The hyper x like's juice, add that along with all the peripherals attached and you've a wattage hungry system there as well.

Try to borrow a low end card that doesn't require the 6pin molex from the psu. This'll free up a 12v rail. Hopefully this'll narrow down the problem if you've already tried the minimum-configuration boot.

[BaZZa]

"Have you tried to boot the pc in minimum psu-use/boot configuration?
Removing and leaving only one dimm, one optical etc?"

Thanks I tried a minimum psu-use/boot configuration but no luck.

"On a rough estimate from the components quoted I'm not happy with your psu amps, why Zalman have put only 16a on each 12v rail is beyond me. I'd've preferred to have seen 2 12v rails with 32a each."

I'm not sure that the 4 x 16A 12V power rails matter that much 'cause they are mostly virtual anyway(all connected together giving a total of 4x16=64A), I read that this has something to do with the ATX2 specs(max 20A allowed on one 12V line).

"The card quoted requires around 26a on the 12 if memory serves."

Read that somewhere to, I believe the quoted specs was 12V 26A mininum 400W PSU, so if I'm right about the PSU (mentioned above) then it should be okay, and of course bear in mind that it's worked fine in the past.

Thanks for the tips. I still have my suspicions about the PSU and your maybe right. As you suggested I'm gonna try a low end card to test this theory out.

There are a couple of other things I didn't mention in my first post that might be useful.

The problem only seems to happen if the pc is switched off for a long period of time, overnight for instance. If I where to shut the pc down, come back half an hour later and power up again its fine. Putting it in sleep mode has the same result, pressing space(or anykey) after half an hour results in a good startup (pc returns to where it was before sleeping). Leaving it in sleep mode results in the same power up problem. Press space and the pc atempts to powerup then shuts down, then after the usual multiple power button presses the system restarts normally (returns to where it was before sleeping)

[BaZZa]

Okay tried a ATi X300 graphics card, still the same prob, that rules out the graphics card and the psu (not 100% so gonna try another psu to be sure) so it''s looking a lot like a mobo problem.