Question Fried CPU or mobo?

[ethanhannay]

There was recently a power outage at my house that damaged my computer. At first I thought that it was only the power supply so I switched it out with another one to test my theory. Unfortunately that was not the issue. I wasn't receiving any kind of display output despite the all of my components receiving power, so I switched out the GPU to see if that did anything. It didn't. I can get my computer to post, but only when it wants to. I've gotten back into windows a couple of times but only when it wants to as well. The power button led lights up only occasionally, but when it does light up it usually posts, but only into safe mode where it tells me if I tweaked anything to revert it back to something stable. CPU and mobo are two components that I don't have spares of or know anyone who does, so I'm not sure if one or the other or maybe even both are toast. Safe mode post

 

[ethanhannay]

If it completes a full run, that should be good enough for typical usage. However, I loop it overnight, whenever I change RAM, motherboards, CPUs, or PSUs, just to be sure. On one or two occasions, it has flagged failures on subsequent passes, after a clean first run.

On one occasion, I found repeatable errors on brand new RAM (running at stock speeds), which I returned under warranty and the replacement passed. I would recommend that to anyone values stability from their system.

Because hardware degrades over time, it's also not a bad idea to run memtest after any crash. Although, I always use a UPS, which pretty much eliminates power fluctuations as a source of system instability, meaning my crashes are always a result of a software or hardware malfunction.

The memory test came back clean. It let me reapply the 3200 mhz setting and actually boot without posting into safe mode and the system has worked fine since I installed a new cpu. Thank you everyone for the help and suggestions.

 

[nicholas70]

Sounds like surge might have damaged the imc on the cpu which would explain why you couldn't run the RAM oc among causing other problems.

 

[bit_user]

The memory test came back clean. It let me reapply the 3200 mhz setting and actually boot without posting into safe mode and the system has worked fine since I installed a new cpu.

You're saying the new CPU solved the problem, right? I'm not sure memtest actually fixed anything... it's only for diagnostic purposes.