Computer Randomly Freezing/paralyzed?

crypt0cipher · May 25, 2022

Hi, hope you are doing good. I'm gonna first give a bit of context. I got an optiplex 3010 DT (2013 model) from used market at a relatively good price. It came with dell casing, dell motherboard, core i5 3570, 2*4 1600 mhz ddr3 ram, oem 260w psu, 250gb hdd and the kid I got it from probably added a gt 730 2GB ddr5 to it for some PowerPoint gaming (jk it's actually a good card it can run csgo and valorant pretty well at low) so anyways this costed me around 20,000 pkr which translates to around 100 usd. Now this is the first time I got a prebuilt so my happiness quickly faded when I realized that the motherboard is probably limited to only 50w of power because... Dell.

When I booted it up it had linux installed which was a fresh installation and it started becoming... Weird. I thought maybe I don't really know how to use linux so I installed windows on it and then my suffering began. The computer randomly freezes and becomes paralyzed. Even during windows installation it just died and then I had to restart. First I thought maybe it's the hdd that's just getting slow because linux was warning about drive failure so I got an ssd. Fixed, right? No. It still continued to just randomly becoming paralyzed and what's weird was that when it "froze" I had to hard shutdown but then it would freeze while booting windows at the spinning circles. It would boot after I tried turning it off and on many times. I thought hey, it's gotta be the ram, right? Reseated the sticks same happened, cleaned them, same happened, tried putting them one by one each in different slots same thing happened replaced them entirely with working sticks the same thing still happened. Then my thought went to maybe the psu but it can't be. It doesn't "shut off" randomly it literally just dies and never recovers. I looked online and they suggested maybe unplugging every usb would do the trick but the same thing happened again and again. I finally thought well, it's definitely the motherboard then. I was randomly looking at the pc till I thought "huh, why is this die just bare? Shouldn't there be a heatsink and I touched the die, it was pretty freaking hot. I instantly knew this might be the culprit. I looked online and got to know it's called a southbridge chip. Now I don't know how long the person before ne used this pc as is with bare die. My only concern is if it has been permanently damaged. However I'm not sure if that is really the issue. Can anyone confirm if it's the southbridge that's causing the issue or is it something entirely else on the motherboard.

crypt0cipher · March 9, 2023

Btw it was the cpu socket pins that were bent. I carefully straightened them out and it's been working fine after that.

papajo · March 10, 2023

On 5/26/2022 at 2:38 AM, crypt0cipher said:

Hi, hope you are doing good. I'm gonna first give a bit of context

Never do that if you are asking help on a forum for a troubleshooting thing just go directly to what works what doesnt the specs and what you have tried(a meta would be to not even mention what you have tried so that you keep a shorter OP in that way, and just respond to people who ask you to do something you tried with "I tried that and it didnt work").

Most people would see a wall of text with irrelevant (to the issue) stuff and get bored and dont even reach to the point where you explain the actual issue so you get no help.

So keep it simple, don't type unnecessary words and use the enter key a lot more frequently.

These are my 2cents so that your next post will actually get some replies.