PC rebooting itself, now dead

[nickc1976]

Hi,

I have a problem with a PC I have been working on.

It was having problems booting up, and would sometimes get stuck in a loop, rebooting itself over and over again. Sometimes, when using a large application which used a lot of processing power it would reboot.

Recently, it was stuck in a loop of rebooting itself, then turned itself off. Since then, it has been completely dead.

I have tried using a different PSU, RAM, fan and HDD, but the machine is still dead.

Can anyone advise whether it is more likely to be the motherboard or CPU which is causing the problem?

Cheers
Nick

[suroy]

I had a similiar problem. An inspection of the motherboard revealed that a number of capacitors were leaking. Replacing all those leaking capacitors resolved the problem. My computer now runs fine. Hope this will help you.

[nickc1976]

In my experience, CPU's fail less than motherboards, so I would normally go ahead and replace the motherboard, but in this case, after the PC died, there was quite a lot of heat coming from the heat sink.

[suroy]

CPU's do fail a lot less than motherboards. The heat could be the result of the CPU running 100% for a long time, before going dead. What are your system specs?

[nickc1976]

I replaced the motherboard over the weekend, all working OK now. Once I'd taken the old motherboard out, and looked at it in a bit more detail, I could see that several capacitors were gone.

Cheers
Nick