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ark_angel
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Is my motherboard going bad?

Mon Oct 10, 2016 7:31 pm

My computer 
i5-4670, ASUS Z87M-PLUS, Corsair CX600M, G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 1600 16gb (4x4gb), MSI Geforce 1070. 840 Pro (OS), 850 EVO (games), then a couple HDD for mass storage.

Initially the problem I was having is when playing Witcher 3 occasionally everything would freeze after forcing a restart the BIOS was unable to find the OS ssd. Completely shutting down then powering back up and the OS ssd was again showing up. I swapped cables between my OS drive and my games drive Witcher 3 would still occasionally crash but on reset the OS drive would be found not the game drive until a full shutdown and restart. I swapped the cable to a mass storage drive that is rarely accessed and no more crashes with Witcher going on a month. Figuring I had a Sata problem.

Today I upgraded from an iPhone 6 to iPhone 7. I never had a problem manually syncing my iPhone 6 over USB but when I plug in my iPhone 7 my computer crashes within a couple minutes. I reinstalled windows 10 to no avail to make sure it wasn't a driver issue. So I'm thinking either my motherboard or PSU but 600W should be overkill for what i'm running.
 
just brew it!
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Re: Is my motherboard going bad?

Mon Oct 10, 2016 8:21 pm

Sounds like you have a bad SATA cable. If I'm reading your post right, the cable that was causing the problems is on a non-OS drive now? I'd still replace that cable if I was you.

The phone crash may be the result of the phone trying to pull too much current from the USB port. Try using a powered hub and see if that helps.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
BIF
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Re: Is my motherboard going bad?

Mon Oct 10, 2016 9:50 pm

I'm with JBI; this is not a motherboard issue. It's probably a bad SATA cable.

A motherboard issue would not crash on just one game or program. Instead, it would crash whenever it wanted. In mine, restarts from cold were gradually becoming more difficult to accomplish, until it just refused to boot either warm (restart) or cold (from "off" state). I think mine was having troubles in the power supply circuitry or possibly in the RAM chips, because there were some other weirdities, such as pressing the reset button would cause a shutdown, then a cold start, and pressing the power button wouldn't do anything unless you held it. Yes, my Windows settings are all correct.

All those things magically went away when I replaced motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

Was it the motherboard "for sure"? I couldn't/didn't want to bother with trying to find a 4-year-old replacement on Ebay or some other place, so I'll never know. Buying another Sandy Bridge E motherboard and hoping my existing memory and CPU will work on it? Hah, maybe I'll take a shot at that someday, but only if I can get an SBE motherboard for a (badly sung) song.

Quite frankly, I'm okay with not knowing (for now), because now I can get my box and my life back to business and I no longer have to use the spare bedroom as "PC sickbay central".

Even a memory or memory socket problem would probably manifest itself fairly regularly. Windows 8 and 10 (I think both) don't load things into the same memory address each time. This shell game is meant to make it more difficult for virus/malware to find your good stuff in memory.

Have you synced your new phone since the crash?
 
ark_angel
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Re: Is my motherboard going bad?

Wed Oct 12, 2016 1:26 pm

I'll swap that cable. I ordered a powered USB hub hopefully that will fix my phone problem.

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