Apologies in advance for providing what will likely be a lot of irrelevant detail, but I am not really sure just what is and is not important on this one... Bear with me, as the problem seems to be a moving target.
A year or two ago, I built a machine for our vacation cabin. It includes an Antec 300 case with a fan on top (that may be important later), a Gigabyte motherboard, an AMD 3-core CPU (I was able to unlock the 4th, but not to keep it stable) and a huge honking CPU cooler. I am not sure who makes it anymore, but it looks a lot like Xigmatek's I see in photos.
The cabin is on a cliff, and last year the cliff started to look like it did not want to be a cliff anymore, so we had to move the cabin. The cabin was habitable during the move, but I suspect power was disconnected and reconnected more than once.
In September, a hurricane knocked a poplar tree onto the house. The roof above the computer sustained a small amount of damage, but there was no sign of leakage. This may be important, or it may be misleading.
However, the next time we visited the cabin, the computer did not work at all. Absolutely nothing happened when I pressed the power button. I unplugged things, flipped the PSU power switch, etc, and eventually managed to get a brief flicker from the lights and a tiny twitch from the fan when I turned it on. I decided to take the machine home where I would have more time and space to play with it.
So, I took it home, let it sit a few days, and then plugged it in and powered it up. Everything immediately worked perfectly. I am not aware that I changed anything, it just worked.
Back to the cabin for another weekend. Hooked it up to the monitor and peripherals, and again it worked fine. Decided, mostly out of laziness, to leave it running all night. It rained heavily. The next morning, it was dead again. Pressing the power button did nothing at all. Worse, I found a few drops of water on the top of the case, near the opening for the top fan. There turned out to have been an extremely small leak right above the computer.
It seems possible that the rain dripped on the case, and got pulled into the fan on the top of the case. That fan is right above the CPU cooler, and the cooler is right above (you guessed it!) the CPU.
After some more fiddling with power switches and cords, I got MOST of the system to light up when I turned it on. PSU fan, GPU fan and all three case fans worked when I turned it on. The CPU cooler fan, however, flickered and twitched, then went dead. Absolutely nothing appeared on the monitor.
So, I took the machine home again, planning to let it sit for a few days to (perhaps) dry out, and to fiddle some more.
Hooked it up and plugged it in at home, and viola!, everything worked fine again. This is where things get weird. Seeing that everything worked fine, I disconnected the vacation box, and reconnected my home machine, only to have a weird controller problem disable my internet access. No problem, I figured, all I need to do is reconnect the now-working vacation box.
Hooked it up, plugged it in, and I was back to square two. PSU fan, GPU fan and all three case fans worked again, but the CPU cooler was once again dead, and the monitor screen was once again completely blank, with no sign of the BIOS posting.
I am pretty sure this is not a connection problem, as the monitor normally tells me if it thinks the cable is not connected. Then again, I have an SSD for the boot drive, so there is none of the tell-tale start-up noise even when everything is working.
I am at a loss to figure out what is going on here. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.
A year or two ago, I built a machine for our vacation cabin. It includes an Antec 300 case with a fan on top (that may be important later), a Gigabyte motherboard, an AMD 3-core CPU (I was able to unlock the 4th, but not to keep it stable) and a huge honking CPU cooler. I am not sure who makes it anymore, but it looks a lot like Xigmatek's I see in photos.
The cabin is on a cliff, and last year the cliff started to look like it did not want to be a cliff anymore, so we had to move the cabin. The cabin was habitable during the move, but I suspect power was disconnected and reconnected more than once.
In September, a hurricane knocked a poplar tree onto the house. The roof above the computer sustained a small amount of damage, but there was no sign of leakage. This may be important, or it may be misleading.
However, the next time we visited the cabin, the computer did not work at all. Absolutely nothing happened when I pressed the power button. I unplugged things, flipped the PSU power switch, etc, and eventually managed to get a brief flicker from the lights and a tiny twitch from the fan when I turned it on. I decided to take the machine home where I would have more time and space to play with it.
So, I took it home, let it sit a few days, and then plugged it in and powered it up. Everything immediately worked perfectly. I am not aware that I changed anything, it just worked.
Back to the cabin for another weekend. Hooked it up to the monitor and peripherals, and again it worked fine. Decided, mostly out of laziness, to leave it running all night. It rained heavily. The next morning, it was dead again. Pressing the power button did nothing at all. Worse, I found a few drops of water on the top of the case, near the opening for the top fan. There turned out to have been an extremely small leak right above the computer.
It seems possible that the rain dripped on the case, and got pulled into the fan on the top of the case. That fan is right above the CPU cooler, and the cooler is right above (you guessed it!) the CPU.
After some more fiddling with power switches and cords, I got MOST of the system to light up when I turned it on. PSU fan, GPU fan and all three case fans worked when I turned it on. The CPU cooler fan, however, flickered and twitched, then went dead. Absolutely nothing appeared on the monitor.
So, I took the machine home again, planning to let it sit for a few days to (perhaps) dry out, and to fiddle some more.
Hooked it up and plugged it in at home, and viola!, everything worked fine again. This is where things get weird. Seeing that everything worked fine, I disconnected the vacation box, and reconnected my home machine, only to have a weird controller problem disable my internet access. No problem, I figured, all I need to do is reconnect the now-working vacation box.
Hooked it up, plugged it in, and I was back to square two. PSU fan, GPU fan and all three case fans worked again, but the CPU cooler was once again dead, and the monitor screen was once again completely blank, with no sign of the BIOS posting.
I am pretty sure this is not a connection problem, as the monitor normally tells me if it thinks the cable is not connected. Then again, I have an SSD for the boot drive, so there is none of the tell-tale start-up noise even when everything is working.
I am at a loss to figure out what is going on here. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated.