Sudden overvoltage issue?

[yesthatbobsmith]

My machine running a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 and 9550 Quad core and 8 gigs of ram suddenly just froze. An attempted restart left me with he ACPI leds off except for S0 which is green. The MD1 led flashes green and MD2 flashes yellow. The manual says they are for warning of overvoltage conditions for memory. The GD1 Led flashes green and the GD2 flashes yellow. The manual say that is a warning for PCIe overvoltage. The CPU led flashes blue continuously. The power phase led array has all leds on continuously. Than has never happened before.
All drives spin and all fans spin.
I have 8 gigs of DDR2 ram that has functioned perfectly since I built the machine about 6 weeks ago. Everything about the machine has been wonderful until now. It has not been overclocked.
The powersupply is an Antec signature 650, supposedly the best you can buy and it has also performed flawlessly till now . The video card is a Geforce 8800GTX with 768 Mb ram. Worked perfectly. I can't even get the machine far enough to display the bios screen. No video at all and I don't think its the card.
What I have done:
cleared the Cmos.
unplugged all the drives except the boot drive.
Tried to restart with only one mem stick. Tried them all individually. No joy.
Unplugged everything except a keyboard and mouse.
Removed all the cards except the video card.
None of this helps.
Any suggestions? What should I try next and what is the significance of the MD and GD leds flashing. The only way I can try new parts is to buy them mailorder. I have no other access.
I would appreciate any advice anyone might have.
Thanks
Bob Smith

[NimrodAUS]

Re: Sudden overvoltage issue?

try starting it up with 1 ram stick, in various slots and without the video card. If you had a spare video card to try do that also. Also try dismantaling the system and rebuilding it out of the case as there could be some sort of short? its happend before. Reset your CPU and power connectors both 24Pin and 4/8pin. your PSU is ment to be pretty good, however I have a Gigabyte ODIN GT 800watt which failed on me within a week. replacement is going strong. The GT is ment to be good to. If you can "borrow" one off a friend maybe?

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Sudden overvoltage issue?

I would test the card in another system to be sure this is not the issue, PSU As well if you can. While you are at that, if you do have a friend where you can test things or another PC you can use at your house I would also test the CPU while you are doing testing to be sure it did not die on you.

As for clearing the CMOS, that would be my first suggestion. Seems you have attempted this but are you sure you tried long enough or properly? Here is my suggested method in Post #2 of this thread >>

http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/bios-flashing-how-qflash-guide-27576/

In that same thread you can also find information for doing a blind BIOS flash if you have a floppy, this would be my next step before a RMA

Have you tried the board out of the case, and OFF the motherboard tray? If not I would try that as well, with NOTHING Connected but the CPU/Heatsink, one stick of ram in slot one, and your GFX Card. That is all, NO Drives (CD or Hard Drive), this will rule out other faulty components or a short causing a boot failure.

The LED's often flash randomly when booting or attempting to boot, so I do not see any real significance in that. Do you have a case speaker, if not can you borrow one? This would help alot. You can even cut up a small speaker or headphone speaker to connect to the board if you feel up to that.

[yesthatbobsmith]

Re: Sudden overvoltage issue?

Thanks NimrodAUS and LSDmeASAP. I tried all of the things you suggested and what worked was to pull the battery, hold down the power button, reset button, and cmos clear for a whole minute. Replaced the battery, fired it up, set the bios to safe defaults and everything is well.
I can't for the life of me figure out what went wrong - but its fixed now.
What I didn't say in my original post is that I use an EFIC boot loader and most of the time run Mac OS X 10.5.6. That is now working perfectly along with my windows XP installation. I just choose which one I want at boot time.
Thanks for the help. I'm a relative nubee in the windows world. The last PC I had before I built this one was an IBM XT with a 20 meg HDD in 1985. I've been Mac since 1986 but its really nice haveing both options in one machine and the Core 2 Quad and video card makes this thing a flamethrower for me. I also have a solariis partition on the machine (31 years with STK and then Sun Microsystems)
Thanks again

[Lsdmeasap]

Re: Sudden overvoltage issue?

Nice to see you got it going!!

Please do not use Fail safe Defaults as that will have many hidden and visible settings incorrect per your hardware. Please load Optimized Defaults, and set your ram voltage then save/apply/reboot.

Good luck with things, post back anytime. MAC user are ya, we all use windows here so we could not help there, few Linux users I see from time to time but not many MAC Users

[NimrodAUS]

Re: Sudden overvoltage issue?

Good to see you got it sorted Bob. Thanks LSD for chipping in. You been away for a couple of Days? Welcome Back!