usually if the PSU is underpowered, you'll get an undervoltage/overvoltage and the pc will shut itself off in self defense. So it's possible, but unlikely.

You may want to start pulling out components. IE, shut off all the motherboard integrated peripherals. Pull out unneeded cards, like sound cards/modems/network cards. Pull out any extra hard drives, all your floppy drives, cd roms, dvd roms, etc. If you have multiple sticks of RAM, pull out all but one. Then see if the issue still occurs. If not, you know it's a failing piece of hardware and can do process of elimination.

If that still doesn't work....well, if you're like me, you have alot of extra components laying around the house. I'd go into that stripped down state and then start sawpping out components, like RAM and whatnot.

Far as I'm concerned, since you've reinstalled the O/S and the exact same problem happens, it's down to either.

1. Buggy drivers that you keep reloading.
2. Bad hardware.

If it was 1, you should find other people online with the same problem.

looks like your prediction of bad hardware is right

last weekend i moved, PC was off from thurs, set it back up last night, everything fine. installed cordless keyboard, played a game or 2 and defragged it. turned it off and ate dinner. great.

came back to it that evening, switch it on, doesn't get to post stage. lights are on on the front panel, fans are going, monitor comes on but is recieving no signal. shit my pants (well, nearly..)

i haven't had time to open the damn thing up yet, any suggestions guys? i dont have any spare parts to swap

EDIT: the gphx card and mobo are a couple of months old, altough i know this doesn't rule them out..

no way to know what it is without process of elimination. You could try reseating everything and pulling out parts that you don't absolutely have to have, like sound cards and network cards and any extra sticks of RAM.

There seems to be a rash of hardware failures lately.

ok, thanks, so you think try one stick of ram at a time?

new to hardware fault finding, could you suggest an order of which parts to pull out?

ok, it was one of the sticks of RAM, so i yanked it out, PC boots. cool. still getting the freezing though, so i tried a couple of other sticks a mate lent me, but the bastard is STILL freezing!

it doesn't do it with less grphx intensive stuff like surfing or playing FM06, you think its worth trying a different card in there?

sorry I never responded to that previous post...never saw it for some reason.

Anyway....if it's freezing up only on graphics-intensive apps, there's a good chance it's your vid card. Or you chipset cooler, as several other people have had issues with. Open up your case with your pc running and check all the fans you can find...make sure they're all doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Following that...if you have a spare gfx card, swap that bad boy out. If you don't have a spare one, you can keep trying to remove other pieces of hardware, but I don't think there's much point.

thanks man, i dont think i'll get a chance until the weekend, i'll let ya know

holy crap..was looking about the net for possible answers and come accross this:

http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php?t=33841030

and

http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthread ... ge=1&pp=20

it seems like asus boards don't handle x1800xt's to well

gotta find a replacement board now, any suggestions?

wow, that sucks. All hail the power of google!

No suggestions though...I haven't built a box in a long time.

I think this is time to repeat one my question: do someone of you know site(s) where someone can get more familiar with the hardware stuff? I'd like to be able to build boxes and trimm mine up because my current configuration does not exploit 1/2 of my graphic card's resources.

Hardware stuff is here more expensive than in USA while the income is alot lower so try to imagine how wrong would be any wrong step. Of course the only thing sellers care about is how to take the money. No one, as far as I know, try to provide the best solution for the customer.

there are lots of hardware sites around discussing various hardware. Bugs, though, are never very clearly documented anywhere. Your best bet is to do a google on your hardware and "bug" or "crash" or something and see if anything interesting shows up.

Well, this would be a good start.

http://www.overclockers.com/
http://tomshardware.com
http://www.anandtech.com/

That should help.

just to give you an update, mashed the old credit card and went skt 939 with an msi mobo and new processor. rock solid, no freezing at all now.

thanks for ya help satis, you gave me some good ideas to get to the bottom of it

lol, my pleasure. I'm glad you're happy now.