Help, I don't know what's wrong - Random Non Starts

[gzunk]

First of all, I assemble all my computers myself and I've had this latest one for about six months. It's mostly top of the range stuff, which I expect to work.

I upgraded the HSF on the processor about a month ago, from the stock coolers and installed the Zalman heatsinks+fans onto the 8800GTX's. No problem, everything was working fine. I bought the new case, transferred everything over, and problems.

But now, after about a month or so, when I switch the computer on, it will look as if it's starting up, but no signal ever gets sent to the monitor. It just sits there doing nothing. I press reset, I power on and off, I clear CMOS and still nothing.

So I remove graphics cards and re-install them. Still nothing. Sit down, have a beer and a cigarette, and turn it on. Suddenly it works. Fine, No problems. After three hours of fretting. When it's up and running the temperatures are fine - CPU not above 60 after intense gaming, GPUs not above 75.

What could be causing this? Bad connectors on the motherboard? Bad Luck? Is there anything I can do???

[hirantha]

take your time and look over the connections again i think something is not seated properly.

[Uberpwnage]

If that doesn't work, maybe try a BIOS update. The Striker series has had issues similar to yours in some configurations.

[lduguay]

My Striker Extreme exhibits the same behavior, and i found that if i give a little voltage boost to the memory, it solves my problem for another 2-3 months. I started with 1.8V, 18 months ago all the way up to 2.25V (before meltdown). So I just bought another 4GB, now running stable at the rated voltage of 2.1V.

My mobo eats memory for breakfast. :(

[XDanger]

are there any beeps? They are coded for different errors right?
I dont have an internal speaker so I dont know

[gzunk]

Unfortunately the new case doesn't have an internal speaker either - otherwise I would listen for the beeps. I've found it impossible to buy an internal PC speaker (for the beeps) apart from on ebay!

[gzunk]

Well I stripped everything down, used a pencil eraser to clean the gold contacts for the graphics cards and the memory, and from a visual point of view it did make the contacts gleam brighter. I carefully blasted all the slots with air and re-assembled...

So far so good - I'm not going to do a BIOS upgrade unless I see more problems, because the upgraded BIOS is marked as beta - and while I don't do anything serious with the computer I don't want to risk anything.

Thanks for the advice (even though it was just to make sure that everything was seated properly)

[DCult]

I had this problem with ASUS motherboards my whole life. It happens when you can't turn off your computer via software and you have to press the power button for a few seconds to turn it off. Problem is most ASUS stupidly overclock your system in a mysterious and at a random spec (which I never found out for not a single motherboard) when you press the power button too much, and when you overclock your system it doesn't even post. When you clear the CMOS however, or leave it 10 mins to clear, it comes back. Another thing that I found out is that apart from this, no post at ALL is usually a DIMM not sitting correctly in the socket. I spend 2 hours once trying to figure out what was wrong and it a was the 4th memory module not having "clicked" at the bottom correctly.