PC works great when booted...but boots irregularly

[mobius29bd]

Hey guys,

A few months ago I did my first build.

Important Specs:

CPU: Intel Core i5-750

MOBO: GIGABYTE GA-P55-UD3L LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX

GPU: SAPPHIRE Vapor-X 100283VXL Radeon HD 5770

PSU: Rosewill Xtreme Series RX750-D-B 750W

RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)

OS: 7 64 bit


I've been really pleased with the performance....when it works. A week after I built it I started getting this issue where it wouldn't boot on the first power on. Everything would power up, drives would spin, but no boot. Power on 2 or 3 more times and it would eventually boot and run without issue.

At first I thought this might be a ram or mobo issue. I had read that gigabyte mobos were extremely picky when it came to ram (my ram is approved though double checked) and once upon start up the system only recognized half my ram. So I re-seated the ram and flashed the bios to f4 which was supposed to fix most compatibility issues. This seemed to help with failed boots becoming more rare. Secondly, I just tried to limit shutdowns by always putting the machine into sleep in order to bypass booting from off.

Well a week ago a started getting the problem where the PC randomly awakes from sleep with a white vertical striped or checkered screen. Occasionally it will do this from inactivity after several hours too. The aforementioned boot issue still persist as well.

To me this seems like a GPU issue of some sort now. The only thing is I've played Dirt 2, World in Conflict, and TF2 all no issue on highest settings. So I know the GPU works. Obviously the way to test this theory is to exchange the GPU out and see if anything changes...but I don't have one sitting around or available to me and the board has no on-board GPU.

These problems are getting to be intolerable and I desperately want a fix. I believe its either the GPU or MOBO. What are your thoughts.

Any suggestions or remedies would be most appreciated.


Thanks

 

[mister g]

Can you check that you plug the jumpers of the mobo that control power boot and reset.

 

[mobius29bd]

Sorry It took so long to get back. Yeah I'm pretty sure those are all right. I've been talking to Gigabyte support a lot and I was able to resolve the boot issue for the most part by changing ram settings in the bios.

The random error screens persist though making me suspect the GPU is at fault, which is probably also causing POST fail on occasion. The only thing that confuses me as to why there wouldn't be error messages if the GPU failed. My greatest fear is the CPU is may be on the way out. But I'm crossing my fingers its the GPU.

 

[faromatacoma]

if i were you, i would give the motherboard back and put an order in for an EVGA motherboard. i never had problems with them and i owned 4. Aus is crap and gigabyte is good, but for quality I would go with evga hands down. Dont waste your time trying to troubleshoot a broken system its more than likely a motherboard problem with ram. If you go on neweggs site about how many ram problems there are with gigabyte, youll want to switch. And even though the new moboard maybe an nforce it will still work just as good and most are backwards compatabile now a days for ati sli and nvidia.

 

[mister g]

POST checks all system components to see if its all right enough to boot, the reason to your GPU question could be very simple, the GPU fails you'll have a blank screen. As for your CPU I have no response to that other than they are durable peices of silicon and usually fry rather than fail.

 

[mister g]

POST checks all system components to see if its all right enough to boot, the reason to your GPU question could be very simple, the GPU fails you'll have a blank screen. As for your CPU I have no response to that other than they are durable peices of silicon and usually fry rather than fail.

 

[mister g]

My bad, IE8 errorred on me and resent the reply.