Cold computer won't POST

Hello all. I hear this is the place to come for help with hardware issues. I hope someone can give me some good advice.

A couple weeks ago, I started having problems booting my computer. After shutting it off overnight, I went to turn it on only to find it wouldn't POST. The tower would power up, fans could be heard spinning (in particular, my video card could be heard going full bore)...the vid card fan would gear down to approx 50%, but no POST...just a black screen. No beep either, by the way. When I hit the reset button, the machine would go through it's POST routine and stop at the "fail to POST" screen, then by hitting F1, I was able to get her fired up.

Now the really strange thing is, this only happens when the machine is cold...if I've been running it for awhile, I can shut it down and fire it back up at will with no problems. After it's been off for a few hours, it won't POST without hitting the reset button.

The only change I can recall making over the last month or so was to update my Catalyst drivers on my 4870 and on my Logitech G11 keyboard. I ended up rolling back the Cat drivers when everything slowed to a crawl...the system was completely unresponsive and would take 2-3 minutes to open up a simple email.

My system specs are:

Asus P5NE SLI
PC Power and Cooling quad 750
Xeon 3110 CPU oc'd to 3.6
Visiontek 4870
4 Gigs of Crucial Ballistix 800 Ram
Seagate SATA HD
Pioneer IDE DVD burner
Samsung SATA DVD ROM

I've found other posts on forums referring to similar problems, but no real answers.

 

sounds like you have got thermal issues something is expanding or contracting check and make sure all pci cards, ram, cables, cpu are fully seated

 

Well, I finally solved my problem. I upped the voltage on my Crucial Ballistix ram while tightening up the timings that were set by the auto detect on my Asus motherboard. I also ditched the Q-connector and plugged my case switches directly into the motherboard. I'm not sure which of those changes actually fixed my system, but it's booting up just fine now.