PC random/frequent restarts

Kaijday · April 16, 2015

So recently my PC crashes/restarted itself and was stuck in a restart loop. I'd turn it on, it'd boot the bios (sometimes far enough into grub) and then restart. The lights on the mobo were showing that everyyything was erroring. So I took it that the mobo was broken. There were no system error codes and everything was working fine before that first crash.

So i bought a new mobo and at the same time a new GPU (my old one was extint). The new mobo did the trick, and everything worked fine for a week. Then it happened again during a game. I ran Prime95 and my CPU failed on a rounding error. (0.5 instead of 0.4 or something...). Everything in the PC is less than year old, apart from the power supply. It's 5 or so years old, 550W coolermaster GX. I thought maybe that could be an issue (as the crashing was happening during gaming only) but the VCore, 3.5V, 5V and 12V all seemed fine in the bios power delivery info. Now the same has happened again and I can't get passed the bios again. It crashes on GRUB or boot into either Linux or Windows.

Specs:

FX 8350 @ STOCK

8GB Patriot Viper RAM, 1633 MHz

Gigabyte 970a-UDP3

R9 280x @ STOCK

Coolermaster GX 550W

Anyone have any ideas? Having just forked out for a new mobo And GPU, this is obv really not ideal for a student haha.

mayu · April 16, 2015

I had similar problem few months ago. Random restarts, sometimes after few hours of heavy usage, sometimes quickly just while browsing. It turned out to be faulty PSU.

Thanks to excellent Corsair support, they even upgraded my TX series PSU to RM series.

blu4 · April 16, 2015

PSU definitely- replace it before it takes out more than itself.

Kaijday · April 16, 2015

Cheers guys. I've stopped using my PC in-case of the PSU taking out other components.

I think it took out my old motherboard, because it was doing some really wierd stuff that the new one is not doing. I'm glad it looks more likely to be a PSU problem, a new CPU would have been a definite cost I couldn't avoid. (ofc it could still be broken haha, but i'll find that out soon enough I guess).