My tower broke down again and refuses to start up; CW: long (3,204 characters), mentioning Linux
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Seems like the original intestines of my most powerful machine are giving up the ghost by and by. I had already replaced the old Radeon HD 7770 graphics card with a Radeon RX 590 a few months ago.
Now something else must have broken.
All I know that the whole machine froze while running under high load, including playing a video. Not even the mouse cursor moved anymore.
Ever since, I can't boot any operating system anymore. The installed Debian seems to halt around the point when it's supposed to create the RAM disc. A Manjaro live system wouldn't boot. Live Debian doesn't boot either, not from an USB drive and not from DVD. It simply stops with a black screen with backlight on. So the boot process starts, but it always halts at some point.
Memtest86+ works. One run didn't show any issues, but I didn't want to leave it running for hours over night or so until something shows up.
Now I'm wondering what broke this time.
RAM: Will be easy to detect by re-installing the old RAM. I got me some used replacement RAM along with the RX 590, also to increase the amount of RAM in the machine. It didn't come in appropriate packaging, though. Still, it worked. Could be it no longer does.
CPU: An old 3-core Phenom II, older even than the mainboard. Might not have survived the mistreatment over the lasts few years. A lot of load for at least one core over hours continuously, and I've never replaced the cooler or the thermal paste. A damaged CPU would be easy to replace for now by acquiring an AMD FX for cheap and adding a second-hand cooler for both the AM3+ and the AM4 socket which I could keep after eventually upgrading the mainboard.
Mainboard: A 970A-UD3. Newer than the CPU, but has seen over a decade of duty. Mainboards should take a lot of beating, but I think they're more susceptible to aging than CPUs. If the mainboard is broken, a repair would be more costly, and I'm on a budget already. Replacement full-size board, replacement CPU (Ryzen 5 Zen probably), replacement RAM, and I'll need a replacement cooler anyway.
SSD: Well, I'd replaced the original HDD with an SSD that had run in another machine previously, although it's still newer than the mainboard. But I don't think live systems refuse to start due to a faulty SSD.
Graphics card: Nope. The graphics card is the second-newest component in that machine. I've installed it only a few months ago. And believe me, I know what a failing graphics card looks like. That wasn't it.
PSU: Nope. That's
the newest component, and I think 500W are sizable for this machine.
Come to think of it, not long after installing the replacement graphics card, I experienced a full shutdown. Like, the machine went out completely at once. That happened when I had two instances of the Firestorm viewer running with both avatars at the same party. I did that because the machine finally had the oomph to handle two Firestorms now with 8GB of VRAM instead of 1GB and 16GB of identical RAM instead of a 12GB hodge-podge partly salvaged from the same machine as the SSD.
I can test the SSD and the RAM tomorrow. As for the rest, no idea.
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