Sparking USB3 Port! (among other things)

[Cockatoo]

Hi all,

Some interesting things have been going on with my PC lately and I was hoping you guys would be able to help me get to the bottom of it.

Symptoms:

-System wakes/ restart immediately (about 3-4 sec) after being put to sleep/ shut down. The only way to actually turn off permanently is to flick the switch on the PSU.

-Both USB3 ports appear to be broken. When connected, things like thumb drives, keyboards or my mouse won’t light up. Interestingly, my external USB3 HDD spins (audibly) but no signal seems to get through to the PC.

-Tiny white sparks can be seen (when lights are off) between USB3 HDD lead and USB3 port when manually connecting.

The PC dual boots Win 7 and OSX 10.8.3, and the issues appeared simultaneously under both systems, so I’d say it’s safe to rule out any driver or software problems at an OS level.

If it’s of interest (personally don’t think it is), on the day the problems appeared, I did a temporary install of Win 8 to make a win-to-go drive with a new flash drive that was first used with the PC on that day. The problems started a little while after the drive was made and the Win 8 partition was deleted.

I’ve reapplied bios, (also tried updating to a newer beta bios) and reset it to default settings. I’ve also completely restored the states of the HDD/ SSD to a time when the problem wasn’t present. None of this worked, so as far as I know, all of that pretty much rules out a software problem of any kind.

Which only leaves hardware…

As far as I can tell (from quick Google searches), only two components could do this, the motherboard or possibly the power supply. The CPU can’t do this, can it?

I built the PC myself about 4 months ago. Up until now, it’s worked flawlessly. Not sure if it’s related or not, but recently (before other problems started) error messages have occasionally been appearing at boot asking me to reset to the default bios settings. Could be related to the small and stable overclock I was running (only to 4.1GHz, up from 3.8 default), but I doubt it.

Gigabyte GA-x79-UP4 Motherboard
Corsair TX-850-V2 850W Power Supply
Intel Core i7-3930K CPU
Nvidia Quadro 4000 Graphics
Corsair DDR3 1600MHz Ram

All important parts are still under warranty. Who should I be calling?

 

[mopman411]

This is a fun one. All the symptoms you describe point me to the motherboard. But then you ask a question, was the motherboard a bad apple or is it something else causing the issue? I would also lean to the Power Supply. With that said there may have been voltage leak to the CPU.. unsure. First thing, get the motherboard and power supply replaced. Test as soon as new ones arrive, stress your CPU, if there are any issues with the CPU get it replaced.. if you can.

 

[Cockatoo]

And now things just take a turn for the bizarre...

After leaving the PC alone for 24hrs (unplugged at the wall), USB3 is working again - the ports are still sparking though.

Now the computer will go to sleep and shut down. But now it won't resume from sleep properly. Fans start up, power lights come on but no display or input.

This new symptom, coupled with the disappearance of some old ones, makes me lean more towards the power supply - which I hope it is. That'd make things a hell of a lot easier. I'll see if I can find a local computer repair shop or something that'll let me borrow a new one to test with.

In the mean time, if anybody thinks I'm wrong, please let me know!

 

[mopman411]

"Fans start up, power lights come on but no display or input."

You said things are still sparking. That means there's an over-voltage somewhere.

Stop turning the computer on.

Your issue sounds exactly like a power supply issue. Be cautioned though, power supplies can take out other things at the same time..or damage them. The motherboard needs to be thoroughly tested or simply replaced.