Failures on wake

Overheal

Hey board. Old friend.

My dads desktop handmade by yours truly has been running into some bizarre issues. Back in June he went away for a summer vacation and came back to find the PC was acting rather odd - i.e. Not starting. My Geeks at my old job ruled a power strike based on what he told them* and they swapped out the PSU. then there were hard drive failures. Fairly Simultaneous failures of different drive types (SSD and HDD) within a few weeks of each other. Then he called saying it died after it woke from sleep, so I had him replace the board which I did the work on, verified the machine was working that weekend I popped in and off I went again. It wasn't a cheap motherboard either it was a Sabertooth FX-890, the original and the replacement.

Well it's still doing the thing. The other week I get a call that the machine just clicked off a minute after waking from sleep. He couldn't get the machine to power on after that, but when I came back into town I finally un-derped and remembered the boards best selling feature: memOK, which was able to get the machine back awake faster than an astromech droid

Everything has been replaced in this build now except the CPU and the Ram (and GPU), and I'm currently running the litany of memtest x86 so far it hasn't stopped with any hard failures on its 3rd pass.

This is where I come to the more hardware inspired crowd: what is the root of this problem? I thought sleep and the memOK fix and assumed RAM, but isn't the CPU most responsible for determine the S-Power states?

* the circuit in his bedroom has tripped in the past during thunderstorms, which to me is bizarre that it doesn't affect the rest of the house but - he's probably talking about browning out because I've seen that before when I lived here, but I put my machine on a regulated UPS the first time it happened - my BIOS went into a safe mode from it, wouldn't boot again until I re verified all the board settings.

Overheal

RAM passed all test with 0 issues or faults found..

Irish Steve

Seen similar issues recently with an older computer, and it's down to bad capacitors that were around at the time when the boards and PSU's were assembled. The electrolyte degrades over time, and they bulge, which often splits the case, then they dry out, and no longer work, so the supply is not smoothed, among other issues.

Had 3 different PSU's over the last 6 months, but they were all made around the same time, so suffer from the same problems, the most common issue is that it takes 4 or 5 attempts to get the machine to boot, but it eventually does come up, but now, it's becoming unstable when it does boot, which is probably going to be one or more capacitors on the motherboard are also now failing.

Same thing can happen with graphics cards, they too had problems for the same reasons.

Not seen it with HDD's, probably because they don't tend to have the higher value (larger) electrolytic capacitors on their circuit boards, but if the PSU is not stable, that then will cause some HDD's to show failure symptoms, but it's down to an unstable PSU line causing it.

Overheal

We can rule out caps though. This board wasn't even 3 years old along with the rest of the build and all quality parts. Corsair HX series PSU ASUS Sabertooth series board, higher end Corsair RAM high end GPU AMD FX-8150

Overheal

Bump...

Happened twice again today under normal use. reseating RAM no good, MemOK did nothing. CPU?