Hey everyone,
My buddy recently got a new AMD FX-8350 for his birthday and we spent the night together getting his PC put back together. We ended up having to reinstall windows because his original motherboard didn't support the new CPU (it was an AM3, not an AM3+.) The motherboard he is using now was my old motherboard from my original build ( GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-S2P Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com), so this is leading me to my first point of attack on possibilities of what is wrong, but I will go over that later in this post.
So anyway, a few days pass by, and his computer starts randomly freezing. He hasn't overclocked his PC or anything, so this has got us scratching our heads trying to figure out what is going on.
So far here is what we have tried:
Reinstalling motherboard drivers
Installing drivers for CPU
updating Windows
updating BIOS (not 100% sure if it actually updated, I've never updated a BIOS before, I basically downloaded the drivers, double clicked it [which gave me the option to extract or cancel], extracted, and that was that).
I have three main theories as to what may be happening:
1st theory: During the installation of the CPU, we made a REALLY dumb installation mistake. We were hooking his case fans up, and at which point, we realized the CPU power had not been connected. We looked up and down, left and right, for the power plug that fit an ATX12 connector correctly... Well, we found one, but it was a molex to 6 pin PCIe connector, but it fit right into the socket. We had three fans in series, and then the connector to the CPU. Needless to say, when we started up the PC, the fans were instantly smoke tested, and we did indeed prove that there was smoke inside the wires.
This leads me to think that possibly the CPU got damaged during that folly (we did actually find that a 8 pin PCIe connector worked correctly, I triple checked the leads and confirmed that pins 1 and 2 were ground, and 3 and 4 were 12V). The only reason I think that this COULDNT be the case, is that the wires basically acted as a fuse and cut the current before it could do any more damage.
Theory 2: Previously, the motherboard was paired with an AMD FX-6100 CPU. My idea is that there could be confusion within the motherboard attempting to treat the CPU as an FX-6100 instead of a FX-8350, which I believe this course of correction would require a BIOS reset?
Theory 3: His PSU isn't providing enough power to his machine? He is running I think a 500W CPU with a mid range video card (it's an AMD card, I don't know AMD cards, I want to say a 7850? Whatever an equivalent to a Geforce GTX 650 would be, or in that range). So we aren't talking a super a thirsty GPU. He's only running one HDD, a DVD drive which never gets used, two sticks of ram, and 5 case fans.
Any thoughts?
My buddy recently got a new AMD FX-8350 for his birthday and we spent the night together getting his PC put back together. We ended up having to reinstall windows because his original motherboard didn't support the new CPU (it was an AM3, not an AM3+.) The motherboard he is using now was my old motherboard from my original build ( GIGABYTE GA-78LMT-S2P Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Newegg.com), so this is leading me to my first point of attack on possibilities of what is wrong, but I will go over that later in this post.
So anyway, a few days pass by, and his computer starts randomly freezing. He hasn't overclocked his PC or anything, so this has got us scratching our heads trying to figure out what is going on.
So far here is what we have tried:
Reinstalling motherboard drivers
Installing drivers for CPU
updating Windows
updating BIOS (not 100% sure if it actually updated, I've never updated a BIOS before, I basically downloaded the drivers, double clicked it [which gave me the option to extract or cancel], extracted, and that was that).
I have three main theories as to what may be happening:
1st theory: During the installation of the CPU, we made a REALLY dumb installation mistake. We were hooking his case fans up, and at which point, we realized the CPU power had not been connected. We looked up and down, left and right, for the power plug that fit an ATX12 connector correctly... Well, we found one, but it was a molex to 6 pin PCIe connector, but it fit right into the socket. We had three fans in series, and then the connector to the CPU. Needless to say, when we started up the PC, the fans were instantly smoke tested, and we did indeed prove that there was smoke inside the wires.
This leads me to think that possibly the CPU got damaged during that folly (we did actually find that a 8 pin PCIe connector worked correctly, I triple checked the leads and confirmed that pins 1 and 2 were ground, and 3 and 4 were 12V). The only reason I think that this COULDNT be the case, is that the wires basically acted as a fuse and cut the current before it could do any more damage.
Theory 2: Previously, the motherboard was paired with an AMD FX-6100 CPU. My idea is that there could be confusion within the motherboard attempting to treat the CPU as an FX-6100 instead of a FX-8350, which I believe this course of correction would require a BIOS reset?
Theory 3: His PSU isn't providing enough power to his machine? He is running I think a 500W CPU with a mid range video card (it's an AMD card, I don't know AMD cards, I want to say a 7850? Whatever an equivalent to a Geforce GTX 650 would be, or in that range). So we aren't talking a super a thirsty GPU. He's only running one HDD, a DVD drive which never gets used, two sticks of ram, and 5 case fans.
Any thoughts?