Hi guys,

I'm having a strange problem with my PC since this morning, so I think its time to ask for help before I end up breaking it up with a hammer this time.

Background info:

This is a new AMD system I built myself about 3 months ago:

ECS KT600-A motherboard
AMD 2700+ Athlon XP cpu
WD 80GB hard disk
1GB PC 3200 memory
ATi Radeon 9800SE 128MB (flashed to XT specs) with Artic Cooling VGA Silencer Rev.3
NEC 3500A DVD-RW drive
Windows XP with SP2 (nLITE version)
All drivers are up to date. The same goes with the BIOS

Here's the situation:

2 weeks after building the system, I wake up one morning and proceed to turn on the PC. To my surprise a black screen was everything I got. I had a Radeon 9200 at that time, so I proceed to test the card on another PC. It turns out okay. I check every component in the PC (minus CPU and mobo) and they turn out to be okay. Finally, I took the mobo and CPU to the retail store I got them from since it was still in warranty. They tested them and find out that somehow the CPU Socket had separated from the motherboard a little bit. This wasn't allowing the PC to work. They gave me a new motherboard from the same brand and I got on my way. I put everything back together and problem solved.

Now...
I started adding a few things to the rig after the incident since I had the money. I got a Thermaltake Silent Boost CPU Cooler, a hard drive cooler, 3 case fans and a PCI exhaust fan. Yes, that's a lot of fans but I got them for pretty cheap. Besides, its better to have more ventilation than none at all. I then got an ATi Radeon 9800SE card and flashed it to XT specs after getting a VGA Silencer for it since the stock fan is a POS. I installed everything on the rig and it was working fine till this morning. I woke up and proceeded to start the PC and guess what happened?

The frigging black screen was there again! I hit reset and this time the hard drive sounded like it was resetting itself over and over again. I proceed to open the case and whiggled the IDE cable and the power connector going to the hard disk. I hit power and now the PC booted, but it took a lot of time to get into Windows. Thing is that I have tweaked the OS (services and stuff like that) to make it boot and work super fast. So that made me a little suspicious that something was really messed up again. I decided to put a little stress on the system by playing Doom 3. To my surprise, the PC started making a weird sound (like pub-pub-rub). Like when you diconnect and reconnect the speakers jacket over and over again. Plus the game kind of freezed for an instant every few seconds. I closed the game and then opened Winamp. The same sound appeared again, plus the music was like in pause all the time. I played a little video with WMP 10 and the same thing happened also.

I isolated the problem to 2 areas right now:
1. Motherboard got trashed again
2. PSU might be dying. This is the only thing I haven't upgraded in the rig and its just a 300W unit that came with the case. I think all the stuff that I have connected to it right now are finally killing it.

Anyone has any ideas on what it might be? CPU perhaps? Video card?

Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for spending a little bit of time in reading this.

Regards,
James

Well, most similar issues I've seen have been too often bad PSU's, especially since you added a new, power hungry video card and more stuff... Otherwise, part swapping is a good way to eliminate possibilities.

Okay, I think I'll get a new power supply tomorrow since it had to be upgraded sooner or later. Also I forgot to mention on my previous post that the HD list is flicking constantly, even whenb the PC is in idle. I read somewhere else that the flickering is a good indicator of a trojan or virus in the system. I'm always updating my AV software (F-Prot) and after running the scanner a few times I didn't found anything. Does the flickering mean anything else? Thanks for the prompt response

flickering of the hdd led , means the hdd is sending/recieving data, which means something is using your hdd, not always a virus

virus'es do use the hdd. also trojans use it more.

also u have an amd system and u overclocked the graphics card. u definitely need to get a bigger PSU. at least 400W.

also if u suspect that its bc of the motherboard again why not change it with another brand?

I was just asking given that I'm no expert at this hardware stuff. Hoever, I'm going to get the power supply tomorrow and then I will see what I can workout with the retailer if the mobo is trashed again. Thanks for all the responses guys and if anyone has other ideas, please post them.

One word that will describe the whole problem.

ECS

I know... Lots of people say it stands for "Economical Crappy Sh1t"... But I've seen many, many of them run without issues for a long time too... Funnily, most people I've seen having issues with them are those with them weak 300w PSUs with not enough juice on the 12v bus - give it a good PSU and usually they run just fine... Been there way too many times before...

Dude, ECS is utter crap, return it and spend the extra 50 bucks on a good mobo, like MSI or Abit. The mobo is your problem.

or asus!

Yes Asus is good, or gigabyte. To make it more Clear to you, Emachines used to use ECS mobo's before gateway bought them

Problem Fixed!!

And it wasn't the mobo or the PSU. It turns out that when I hit reset after the black screen appeared for the first time, the hard drive started to reset itself continously. After I got it to boot, the system was very slow. I decided to play a little bit more with the PC today, so I went to the Device Manager to check the IDE Primary Controller to see in what mode the HD was working. To my surprise it was on PIO Mode Only. I did a little bit of googling and found and article fro mMicrosoft in which it tells you to delete the driver from the IDE channel you want to revert to its "normal" state. I did that, rebooted the machine and voila!!! Problem solved!! No more strange sound or pauses in games. After that I went to buy a 500W PSU as a safety measure. I'm also looking forward to changing the Economic Crappy s*** mobo later on for an ASUS.. But for now, the ECS isn't to blame.

Thanks for all the help guys!!