Did the motherboard give any beeping error codes? Can you access the BIOS?

It seems like a power issue to me.

no error beeps (even made sure the speaker was plugged in)

and no, it powers up the keyboard (on ps/2, but not usb, in fact, there is no usb power at any stage during the boot) but it fails to read the keyboard, so unable to access the bios

only was I got the error message "overclock failed, will restart in 15 secs" however there isn't any overclock

the rest of the time I get
"no keyboard detected
USB overcharge restart in 15 secs"

so not sure

the only other issues i've had with this setup was when the heatsink unclipped (thru movement in a car) and I changed the PSU when I got the new video card (because at the time I didn't think that a 550 watt was upto running 6 hdd's place a gtx 570, and a gts 450, hence the 775 watt psu, and the gts450 is now in another PC) I doubt it is a PSU issue as there is a heap of leeway on that, and it is much newer than the motherboard (and it cost more)

have you tried draining the power?

turn it off at the switch and then hit power on the box, it should clear out any remaining charge which might help, although its doubtful.

You should do everything you can to rule out the PSU though, it could very well still be that. A new PSU is much cheaper than a new motherboard.

Just doing a Google search it seems that "overclock failed, will restart in 15 secs" message is related to ASUS motherboards. The general consensus is to clear the CMOS and reset BIOS back to default, also ensure you aren't running your RAM at different frequencies.

If that doesn't work, try getting the BIOS to do a diagnostic at the startup, may fix the issue or at least tell you which componenet is the cause. Worse comes to worse, pull each part out and you may find the cause.

If that doesn't work, I suggest an ASRock motherboard. They are "from" Asus but seem to be made differently or something. I'm running an ASRock Extreme 4 Gen 3 and have had no problems what so ever.

Also for reference my system is nearly identical to yours, except I only have 3 SATA HDD, an SSD and 650 watt PSU.

Ram can stop a pc from even reaching bios.

Pull out every stick and if you get a beep (without bios) then that's probably a good sign

Then put a ram stick in, see if it works, if not, try a different one.

Also have your videocard out at the time, and maybe even all your sata+external usb headers pulled off.

Otherwise yeah, i'd blame either your mobo or psu, but i'd want to be sure which first.

You're right though 400 for a board is more than you'd ever use, and <90 is too cheap, around 150 should suit you, anything by asus/asrock/gigabyte should work fine for years. I've even got a spare p67a-ud3r-b3 board (doesn't support SLi) which is socket 1155.

tested the ram (tried each set by itself) and the memtester runs thru that anyway, still no joy,

it now just loops and doesn't boot into even the error screen (unless i hold the memtest button on the mobo) it powers up the fans, spins up/engages the drives, dies, then starts the process again, no beeps, (unless the ram is out)

I get the same results with the 550watt psu and the geforce 8400 (the slowest card I have, the the lowest power user) so really guessing the mobo is the issue (have no other boards to test the ram in, but ripjaws aren't known to have two different pairs fail are they?)

it now just loops and doesn't boot into even the error screen (unless i hold the memtest button on the mobo) it powers up the fans, spins up/engages the drives, dies, then starts the process again, no beeps

I had this exact problem with my 1155 build a few months back on an ASUS board I got, what got it running for me was using an aftermarket CPU cooler and not the stock cooler. I think in my case though, it was fundamentally related to the PSU because I've run into similar issues lately on some older Socket 1366 boards with two different Thermaltake PSU's, I've also got a Coolermaster and that actually fixed all my problems.

well I have 2 thermaltake toughpower PSU's and seeing that they both power up the old board (an old dual core system I use as a media box) I didn't think the issue laid there

i've setup my old PC and am now firmly over fault finding, it is the mobo, no doubt about it, I got it at umart, and tbh, it was cheap then, and being a P67 my understanding is that I would be better off with a Z77 anyway


thinking this might do the trick (needs to have 7 or more Sata ports, which seems to be the limiting factor on some other boards)
http://www.umart.com.au/pro/products_listnew.phtml?id=10&id2=177&bid=2&sid=89372

2 things to check copius before new motherboard.

Check all usb ports and see if any are physically broken.

Run the computer without mounting it in the chassis.

last edited by RUSTA at 15:52:55 24/Aug/12

well I have 2 thermaltake toughpower PSU's and seeing that they both power up the old board (an old dual core system I use as a media box) I didn't think the issue laid there

Yep, same here 2 Thermaltake Toughpower PSU's, they do work on some my boards particularly my old 775 boards I never had an issue, still don't, I've got one currently running on my 1155 board but could only get it to work with the aftermarket cooler as mentioned (though the coolermaster worked perfect regardless of the CPU cooler installed).

On my 1366 boards, both Thermaltake PSU's displayed slightly different problems depending on the model board I plugged it into (5 different boards total), I've spent several months off and on testing all this so I won't go into mega detail here but the first 1366 both that was running for 2 1/2 years and suddenly just stopped one day which triggered all this, stuck in the power loop. I didn't have any spare 1366 gear lying around so I bought secondary parts off ebay for troubleshooting (with the intention of reselling after I'd finished with them), second CPU, RAM, Mobo (ended up with 2 mobo's off ebay, longer story) so I could interchange everything and work out what was at fault. Could never get the original 1366 board working so I RMA'd it thinking it was faulty. In that time whilst I was waiting for it to come back, I decided to just upgrade my whole system to 1155 and ebay everything 1366 once I worked out what was at fault.

Anyway, got it back a month later, problem wasn't fixed. After heaps more messing around, I finally decided to try a 3rd PSU and not a Thermaltake one, but a Coolermaster I had just stripped out of anoter system. Bingo, everything worked, tried another 1366 board, a comination of every part on every board, flawless, tried the 1155 board, perfect even with the stock cooler. I read somewhere the other day (and I'm pissed I can't find the link again) that the Toughpower PSU's have some type of power switching tech in them that is prone to these looping problems on some motherboards but that was one guy on one forum so take that with a grain of salt but it sounded convincing enough.

So, I'm not by any means saying the PSU is your problem, if you look up system power looping issues on the net, the're all over the place and tend to be all sorts of different causes, sometimes it's the RAM, sometimes it is the board and it just needs to be RMA'd. All I'm saying is after a s*** load of time spent on a similar issue to yours, this is what I found my problem to be and if it saves you as much f*****g around as I've gone through recently, then fantastic.