Hi everyone! I'm not entirely sure that this is the right section for me to post this, but I'm guessing my problem is motherboard related, so here goes.
I've been having some trouble on my PC for the past couple of days. The first time it happened, I turned on my computer, it booted, got into Windows and I didn't touch it at all, I was doing something else in my room when suddenly the PC reboots, beeps 4 times and doesn't boot again. I left it alone for a minute or so, it would just beep 4 times and try to reboot, again and again. I turned it off for good, waited a few minutes and turned it back on again, it was fine, had no more problems. I googled the 4 beep thing and it seems to point towards a 'system timer failure', which according to other posts and threads online could be related to a lot of things, one of which was the memory.
This morning I had yet another issue, I only had Chrome open, I left the computer and when I came back the screen was frozen. No blue screen, nothing, it was just completely frozen on some random reddit thread. I rebooted and it was fine.
This is probably unrelated, but when I came back from work I turned the computer on and I got some pop up on windows to install a 'intel manageability engine firmware recovery agent' update or something. I canceled it since I was already planning to test my memory and I just wanted to download memtest.
Anyway, I made a USB bootable drive with memtest and I first tested with the two memory sticks inserted (as they normally are). A bunch of errors showed up on test #6, about 1m30s into the test. Memtest actually locked up completely, the timer stopped altogether. I turned the computer off and tested both sticks individually on the motherboard's A1 slot, ran a complete pass on both of them with no issues. Additionally, I tested one of the memory sticks on the B1 slot, also no problems.
I placed both sticks in as they originally were, tried to turn on the computer, got 4 beeps again. I tried waiting and booting like last time, got 4 beeps once more. I then switched the two sticks around, and it booted, now I'm using the computer with no issues.
Ever since the problem started, while the computer's running I've been able to run pretty much everything I usually run, some games, torrent client, chrome, steam, discord, etc. I'm running Windows 7 and my PC's specs are:
Intel Core i5 3570K
ASRock Z77 Pro3
ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 970
Corsair Kit 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Vengeance CL9 (2 x 4GB sticks)
Corsair CX-500W Power Supply
All components are about 3 and a half years old, except for the GTX 970, which is less than a year old.
I checked the computer's fans, they all seem to be working well.
Given the memtest results, I'm guessing it's probably related to the motherboard? If so, is there some way I can test it to get a more conclusive result before I make any replacements? Or do you have any other suggestions? I'd appreciate any help! Please let me know if you need any more information. :)
I've been having some trouble on my PC for the past couple of days. The first time it happened, I turned on my computer, it booted, got into Windows and I didn't touch it at all, I was doing something else in my room when suddenly the PC reboots, beeps 4 times and doesn't boot again. I left it alone for a minute or so, it would just beep 4 times and try to reboot, again and again. I turned it off for good, waited a few minutes and turned it back on again, it was fine, had no more problems. I googled the 4 beep thing and it seems to point towards a 'system timer failure', which according to other posts and threads online could be related to a lot of things, one of which was the memory.
This morning I had yet another issue, I only had Chrome open, I left the computer and when I came back the screen was frozen. No blue screen, nothing, it was just completely frozen on some random reddit thread. I rebooted and it was fine.
This is probably unrelated, but when I came back from work I turned the computer on and I got some pop up on windows to install a 'intel manageability engine firmware recovery agent' update or something. I canceled it since I was already planning to test my memory and I just wanted to download memtest.
Anyway, I made a USB bootable drive with memtest and I first tested with the two memory sticks inserted (as they normally are). A bunch of errors showed up on test #6, about 1m30s into the test. Memtest actually locked up completely, the timer stopped altogether. I turned the computer off and tested both sticks individually on the motherboard's A1 slot, ran a complete pass on both of them with no issues. Additionally, I tested one of the memory sticks on the B1 slot, also no problems.
I placed both sticks in as they originally were, tried to turn on the computer, got 4 beeps again. I tried waiting and booting like last time, got 4 beeps once more. I then switched the two sticks around, and it booted, now I'm using the computer with no issues.
Ever since the problem started, while the computer's running I've been able to run pretty much everything I usually run, some games, torrent client, chrome, steam, discord, etc. I'm running Windows 7 and my PC's specs are:
Intel Core i5 3570K
ASRock Z77 Pro3
ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 970
Corsair Kit 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Vengeance CL9 (2 x 4GB sticks)
Corsair CX-500W Power Supply
All components are about 3 and a half years old, except for the GTX 970, which is less than a year old.
I checked the computer's fans, they all seem to be working well.
Given the memtest results, I'm guessing it's probably related to the motherboard? If so, is there some way I can test it to get a more conclusive result before I make any replacements? Or do you have any other suggestions? I'd appreciate any help! Please let me know if you need any more information. :)