Two Dead Systems in a year and a half

[TheX1le]

I have an interesting problem. When the amd 64 started to come down in price i built a system, 3400 with gig of corsair twinx pro series ram, Antech smart power 350 250gig sata drive. Nvidia 5600. It was a decent system and it ran well however one day it up and just died. Turned off in the middle of GTA Vice and refused to turn on again. Put in a differnt PSU and it ran for a day and then died. Very confusing pissed me off i put it to the side and used my other desktop.
Well i had since replaced with with an AMD 3700 Watercooled with DFI Lanparty board used the same ram from dead system number 1 but got a new maddog 500w modular power supply. This system had 3 vid cards to drive 4"21" monitors. A 6800GT, 5500, both from nvida and some ATI card i had laying around. Also had ATI tv card. now other then adding the extra vid cards and the tv cards and swaping the ram i did not build the second system. It ran great for almost a year at my house and last night it up and died the exact same way. Just shuts off and refuses to turn back on. PSU is fine chip is fine ram is fine... Im quite confused. I think its power related and only thing i can think of is the Belkin 1000va UPS that i use. Any one have any suggestions as to the cause of these deaths? i dont wanna get a new board only to have it die in a year.

EDIT: i also lost a monitor that was attached to that UPS and my server that was connected had some power issues after about a year... server is no longer used.

[SirDice]

Sounds like you need a surgeprotector..

[TheX1le]

Sounds like you need a surgeprotector..

I have several. However its surge ===> UPS ====> computer

[SirDice]

You could try

surgeprotector ==> UPS ==> surgeprotector ==> computer..

The first is to protect your UPS and the second is in case the surges actually come from the UPS..

[thehorse13]

I had a similar issue years ago when I lived in a crappy apartment with bad electrical wiring. I lost 3 boxen while living there. I eventually went ahead and grabbed an APC surge protector and I had no further issues. I agree with SirDice, this sounds very much like a power surge/sag issue. How old is that UPS you have? Good quality brand or CompUSA special? I have seen cases where the UPS becomes FUBARed and throws out huge power spikes.

--TH13

[nihil]

Hmmmm,

I would suspect the UPS myself. PSUs and UPS do deteriorate over time............ also it sounds as if you might have been overloading it.................from what I can see that UPS supports 550W.

It depends on what you had plugged into it???

[steve.milner]

Why do I wonder if over-clocking is an issue?

Steve

[thehorse13]

Why do I wonder if over-clocking is an issue?

Steve

Typically when you overclock incorrectly, you end up melting the CPU socket or the board itself. It's very funny to see the end result knowing that the person went way too far with it.

If it was done correctly and he was in the tuning phase with just a hair too much overclocking, you'd see the flaky CPU behavior very quickly, not after a year or so of solid use.

I've never seen a power supply go south because of overclocking.

--TH13

[nihil]

It does happen................I guess I have seen every PC component trashed through overclocking.

What happens is that people sort of get it right, but they set their shutdown threshold temperature too high. They also fail to add suitable additional ventilation and keep their fans clean.

Over a period of time, crud gathers in the heatsinks and fans, temperatures build up, and components fail. This is quite insidious as opposed to the traumatic overclocking failures you describe.

In this case though, I think that the UPS is the prime suspect.

[TheX1le]

There is no over clocking done on this box however the idea is apealing. The water cooling was done to make the system slient.... as for the crud i vacume out the box about once every two months with it off and grounded... Im tending to agree that the UPS is the issue. its two ears old spent 80 bucks on it. It was a microcenter special but it is a belkin...