PC's crashing?!

[Hightower]

Strange problem this one. Since late last week we have 6 machines that have/are crashing. All are on the CC3 network. 4 are RM One's, 2 are RM 2400's.

The symptoms are:

Screen goes blank, no response to mouse/keyboard, can only power off by holding the power button down for 'x' seconds - will not power off normally using ACPI.

The RM One's that are doing it are all in the same room. We've tried rebuilding all of them, and all of them today are doing it again. With the RM One's they are doing it every 10 minutes or so. They are in a room of 18 and the remaining 14 are fine.

The 2 x 2400's have each suffered these symptoms once, and after a hard power off and turn back on they have not suffered since.

Does anybody have any idea of what this could be? I could understand it being faulty hardware if it was happening to one model, but it has happened to 2 completely different model machines.

[graywoodford]

Hi
We have had this issue with a certain type of model: RM ASCEND 2030, very strange behaviour, we have locked most of it down to an overheating issue. What we have done to stop them black screening is:
1: check bios, default will be 60 degrees cpu temp from boot so have dropped to about 52 to make the fan work harder
2: In bio we also make sure plug and play os is set to yes (so the os can control your fan speed)
3: Re thermal pasted the cpu with some silver paste to help reduce the temp

This has help on pretty much all the machines but on one we had to have a motherboard replaced as the cpu temp was getting to 100 degrees!! so faulty motherboard.

When they do black screen we found that doing the hard reset (holding the button down) and then unplugging the power cable for about 5 minutes then plugging it back in and restarting the machine also worked but this was only a short term fix.

As for you having the issue on 2 different types of rm pc's i would just double check the temperature on the rm one's (we have some very old rm one's but do not have this issue with them but they are so slow!) Then possibly try re pasting the cpu if needed or if they are in your warrenty i would call them out to look at it and see if some motherboards need replacing mpossibly.

Hope this helps