Hardware Reboot when launching Orbiter, serious issues at system boot

[Xyon]

Good power supplies are middling in price. The 1000w PSU currently powering my gaming rig was around the £100 mark (~=$155 US). Not "super cheap", no, but certainly affordable and perhaps more than I need at the moment.

A good 800w PSU will set you back between the £50 - £100 range at the moment.

 

[N_Molson]

OK, here are the news.

I got that new 600W power supply, it's obviously a high quality one and cannot be compared to the former I had.

The bad news is that's too late. The new PSU works perfectly, the leds of the MB light as they should... and I get exactly the same reboot at startup.

So I was a little pissed off, and visited the local computer parts retailer... He said that, at this point, that can be only the MB.

• It's not the RAM, because I have 2 sockets and tried to run the system on 1 socket (1024 MB), and that didn't change anything. The retailer said that the probability that the 2 sockets are both failing is very, very low.

• He said that can't be the CPU, because I would have freezes or overheating, but no spontaneous reboot.

• He also said that a failing graphic card wasn't able to reboot the system on it's own.

So it lets only one suspect : the motherboard, which has probably been damaged to the point it can hardly boot the computer.

So I'm going for an almost whole new comp... The only thing I'm going to save is the screen, the new PSU of course, the (quite obsolete) graphic card and the budget case... :shrug:

Here's the stuff I bought, I'm going to have it tomorrow. That's not the top, but I had the whole for "only" 394€ :

CPU : Athlon II X2 245 2.90Ghz + the fan & thermal paste to go with it
MB : GA-MA790XT-UD4P - AMD790X+SB750
RAM : DIMM DDR3 2Go PC10600 1333Mhz (that cost really a lot these times, but of course the sockets I have are DDR2 ).

I just managed after maybe 20 attempts to run Windows, I'm going to backup data like crazy while I still can, because one of the disks will probably have to be formated to re-install Windows.

Well, that what's happen when you think you'll save money by buying a cheap PSU... :beathead:

At least I'll be ready for the multi-light support :lol:

 

[dbeachy1]

Actually a bad CPU or flaky graphics card hardware could possibly cause a random reboot, although it's not likely. What typically happens is that some piece of hardware crashes the data bus or doesn't release it, and so watchdog logic reboots the system. The motherboard does seem the most likely culprit at this point, however. Hang in there!

 

[N_Molson]

Got the new hardware, assembled it and... got the same problem again :suicide:

The new motherboard displayed in the few first seconds "Warning : POST Errors"

The good thing is that this new motherboard has a quite capable GPU chip on it and a VGA output, which wasn't the case of the former one.

So I quickly powered off the computer, dismounted the graphic card, and plugged the screen directly on the MB.

Since then the system is running perfectly, even much better than before (now everything is brand new, including the PSU)... So the faulty part was the GPU, and we'll now know that a damaged GPU is perfectly able to reboot a computer on it's own... *sigh*

So I ordered a new GPU (the quite affordable Nv GT240 (1Go DDR3)), and an additionnal DDR3 socket so that I'll have 4GB of RAM.

I wonder what I'm going to do with the old motherboard, which has a proc and (DDR2) memory sockets mounted on it...

What's fun is that I can play Orbiter on the MB integrated GPU with a decent FPS of 60 when landed at the Cape with the Lvl14 textures... :blink: The drawback is no antialiasing and no anisotropic filtering. But with the new GPU, I should be able to play the most complex scenarios like Thorton's ISS and have another try at OGLA :thumbup:

 

[N_Molson]

New GPU NvGT240 installed in a few minutes, works like a charm... The additional 2GB of RAM are welcome too, XP runs a lot better and starts faster. The 3 (large) fans work very well and are almost silent compared to the former ones. It's a real comfort, especially when listening at music.

Excellent framerate in Orbiter 2010, Moonbase Alpha runs smoothly in 1280x1024, was able to do some stunts with the rover :thumbup:

A costly (and complete) upgrade, but I got the framerates I was dreaming of...

 

[Glider]

umm, what? That only applies if you buy the cheesy 100w PSUs. you need at least 600w to run a modern computer, and a 700w minimum for good graphics cards

Wow... 600w. I think this is so only for PSUs of poor quality that are not able to produce declared power or for computers based on overclocked quad-core CPU with R5970... For example my 5 years old 360 W (Ascot) PSU is powering my current system (E5200 overclocked to 3.5 GHz ( 1.35V ) at 1333MHz FSB with 8800GT 700/2000 and six 3.5' hard disks) for 2 years without any hardware problems with normal voltage at 12 (11.95 at windows ~11.75 when CPU and GPU are fully loaded ) and 5V lines. Even more, it was capable of powering my previous system (Athlon 64 3000+ overclocked to 2.5 GHz with x700pro) without any PSU-caused problems for 3 years before. If I remember correctly when I tried to measure a real power consumption of my current system by an external watt counter that was only around ~250-260 watts (fully-loaded by games) and ~140 watt for windows' desktop.

 

[Xyon]

Given that you've got a totally new system (Which is not dissimilar from mine now), I'd recommend upgrading to Windows 7 when you can. You'll most likely wind up getting better framerates in most things, I know I have.