Dead mobo or PSU

[hudsonroot]

SPECS:
gigabyte-ga-z97x-gaming 3 mobo
MSI nvidia gtx 970 GPU
Corsair cx 500m PSU
Intel i7-4790k CPU
Kingston hyperx fury 16gb 1866 MHz RAM

It all started a few days ago when I downloaded the game "rocket league"(Which has apparently fried some other people's PCs). A few mins into the first game, my pc shut off. Then after starting up and joining a new game, it happened again. Then again. And again. It then started to happen in other games (not all games though) and in the gfxbench OpenGL benchmark. Being that this build is also a hackintosh, i booted into OS X and tried running gfxbench from there. That's when it got a lot worse. It got much further through the benchmark than it did when running it through windows, but alas, the same random shutdown happened again. Only this time it wouldn't start up- the case fans start whirring and the MSI light on the side of my gpu lights up, but the red LEDs on my mobo don't light up, the cpu fans don't move, and when I felt the base of my cpu cooler for a few seconds it wasn't warm, so im assuming that's not starting up. Theres no signal on my monitor- no gigabyte splash screen, no error message, nothing. I'm assuming either my mobo or my PSU is fried but I have no idea how to figure out which. It's worth saying that i think the two issues (one happening in windows, one in OS X) might actually be unrelated. It seemed like the GPU fans weren't spinning while running the benchmark in OS X, so MAYBE that last fatal shutdown was caused by an overheat, rather than the ones in windows that were started by whatever Rocket League did.

Thanks for helping.

 

[andreii707]

It's hard to pinpoint the problem unless you have a friend or relative who can help you test your components, or another PC. I would recommend you check the PSU, it's easier to remove it and if it works you could assume it's the motherboard.

 

[smorizio]

the cx line of units is not a great unit. also you have the min sized unit that nvidia spec for that gpu. you may have loaded the power supply 12v rail to much and it failed. with a gaming pc you want to have a power supply that 100w more then you need to give the 12v rail a little extra head room. easy test is pull the gpu see if the mb post with onboard video and clear the cmos. if some of the case fans and hard drive still spin up...you lost one of the legs of the power supply. take the unit out and with a volt meter check the voltages. you have to jumper the green wire to a black wire on the 24 pin atx plug to start the power supply. take the black lead from the volt meter set the meter to dc.
you should see 12v 5v 3.3v when testing.
http://www.smps.us/atx-pinout.png

 

[Ra_V_en]

Many words not so many clues...
It might be almost anything, without step by step method you are not gonna solve it quick...
1) Take out GTX 970 and turn on iGPU
2) Install HWMonitor and looks closely to all temps.
3) IntelBurnTest, if fails = CPU or MEM
4) Run MemtestX86, if fails = MEM
5) Put in GTX 970 and run GFX bench, if crashes this points more to GPU and PSU

For now those steps are enough to get more clues..

Btw it doesn't matter how good CX series are. For this PC specs if CPU and GPU are not OC'ed this should be fine 100% of time.
CX 500 has 38A 12V rail, its not Chinese 1kW 15A 12V No name PSU for God's sake.