PC randomly restarts

[Ricestorm]

A couple of days ago my PC started to randomly restart, I wasn't doing anything like playing games or anything that would be putting a heavy load on my CPU or GPU. The next day it did the same thing but this time after the random restart, it was stuck trying to boot up. I could see hear it trying to start the HDD was starting and stopping my motherboard LED was going from bright to dim, and it was failing to even give a POST beep. The only way I could get it to startup was to unplug the power for a few minutes.

After that I started getting those symptoms as well as new ones such as one of my monitors going white the other going black, another time I got a yellow screen, both happened while I was playing games. Sometimes Windows would start loading and my PC would restart halfway thru loading, but starting up in safe mode and then starting it in normal mode would fix the issue. I've gotten a "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered" error in my event log.

To attempt to fix the issues I've re-installed windows with updated drivers, bought new RAM which seems to have made the issue less frequent, and I tested my power supply when it was stuck at restart and it seems to be fine though it wasn't tested under load. I was also monitoring my temps and my cpu at max temp was around 55 and GPU was around 70 - 80 while I was playing games...

I have a feeling its my motherboard thats the issue but it could be anything since my PC is pretty old, but wanted to see if anyone had some insight into this...

Thanks

Specs:
Asus P7P55D-E
Intel I5-760
EVGA GTX 480
Corsair TX850
ADATA XPG V1 Series Black 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz

Nothing is overclocked

 

[cin19]

If you got the error message like "Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered", that means it is related to the display from PSU, GPU, pcie slot( motherboard), and the driver.
1) Because you try to reinstall the OS, so the driver will be fine.
2) Try move the gtx480 to the other pcie slot to see you still have problem or not, that is for testing the pcie slot ( or the MB).
3) Use the MSI afterburner to unclock the gtx480 to test the PSU to see it can power the GPU or not. http://event.msi.com/vga/afterburner/download.htm
4) Do you have other GPU to test? Also test the gtx480 in other PC.

 

[Ricestorm]

Thanks, I'll give those a shot and hopefully I can find the culprit. Probably going to take a while since it seems to be okay for the past 2 days....

 

[Ricestorm]

Updating in case anyone has a problem similar to mine.
My computer started to not boot and was stuck in an endless restart loop, so I decided to replace the motherboard and CPU, its been a week later and still not crashing. I'm not entirely sure if it was my motherboard or CPU but one of those components was definitely the problem.