HELP!! Riddle me this! Can anyone even *theorise* how this could happen? [UPDATED]

DeVore

So, I'm hopeful I just found the issue... (he said, tempting fate).

This morning the machine had died over night while in a freaking SLEEP STATE. Wouldn't boot. Tried to but would then decide life wasn't worth living and just stop.

I took the case apart, intending to start my diagnosis as outlined above and yes, taking out the video card let the machine boot fine using the on board GPU. Sh*t I thought, theres 600 notes for a graphics card. Went to walk the dog, came back and it had BSOD again and wouldn't boot again. Swapped around the ram in singles... no joy. Decided it was worth just poking it with a stick basically, to see if something might just be a dodgy connection and lo and behold there was a fan cable, right beside the video card, pressed in between the CPU and the GPU that was slightly unseated. I reseated it, tried again and bootastic! Put everything back in (very carefully because this power connector could easily be knocked out trying to get the g-card in, its in an awful spot) and so far so good...

This would explain much of the issue... the issue initially arose when I was putting in a second HDMI cable into the G-Card. Any wiggling of the card could easily have bumped the power cable to this fan. Then it would happen when the card kicked into a higher gear in any cutscenes... then when we changed the PSU to the bigger one, it seemed to get even twitchier (presumable we loosened it further) and so it became more common.

The one thing I cant understand is why it would pretty reliably work the next morning!

Hopefully this is finally it!!! (Btw, a big thanks to Dav for all his help, he's a rock and very knowledgeable about computer bits! )

Cuddlesworth

DeVore wrote: »

The one thing I cant understand is why it would pretty reliably work the next morning!

Because, your case and the boards themselves were cold. Could have been a fraction of a milimeter in the shorted cable.