Will it be sparks from my A-Data Ram or Asus motherboard?

[rogerthat1945]

I was playing Battlefield 4 on my Haswell i7 rig and there have been a few `glitch issues` over the past few weeks culminating tonite in the PC shutting down and getting locked before being able to get into BIOS (PC told me to alter something in Ram in BIOS when it re-booted).

However, 5 minutes of cooling and it started up again; but as I switched the power back on and was looking in the PC I saw sparks flying near the RAM and the motherboard.

The A-Data ram has defaulted from its XPG 1866 normal status down to 1333? (sub-normal for this ram).
The Samsung SSD and Windows 8 Pro (x64) is fine. Nothing is overclocked. I don`t overclock. Even the i7 is a standard 4770 with no overclocking.

The iChiLL GTX 780 seems fine. It was hot though. I could not get a temperature reading as the PC had shut down. Its currently doing 57DegC on a TechPowerUp GPU-Z render test.

The i7 seems to be fine.

The Asus Sabertooth Z87 seems to be working and the software indicates no problems.

Any ideas about the sparks? I can smell the light burning smell, but cannot see anything beneath the Sabertooth thermal armor?

P.S.
For weeks, after an hours BF4 play I have been having the PC AUTOMATICALLY putting me into and locking me into BF4 Console... And sometimes I have had to re-boot to get out of the glitch.

Cold that be down to faulty A-Data Ram?

Could the sparks be from (what was) the V Hot Ram?

I am running it at the mo. but will not go back into the game.

 

[d1nky]

This sounds quite bad tbh, a bios change (unless applying huge amounts of voltage) shouldnt make components spark!

What exactly did you change in bios?

It could of been a VRM on the mobo or something on the ram modules sparking/burning. Can you see any signs of damage or burns?

 

[rogerthat1945]

This sounds quite bad tbh, a bios change (unless applying huge amounts of voltage) shouldnt make components spark!

What exactly did you change in bios?

It could of been a VRM on the mobo or something on the ram modules sparking/burning. Can you see any signs of damage or burns?

I didn`t change anything in Bios. I`m pretty sure I never said I did. The PC did re-boot and ask me to change something in the Bios to do with RAM. But I couldnt get into Bios that time; and the following few attempts to re-boot by-passed the BIOS and the PC started again.

I would have to strip my PC down to see any signs of burns as the Asus Sabertooth Z87 has full thermal armor.

NOTE
The RAM is sold as 1866, but I think the problem may be A-Data overclocking it to 1866, which overheats it; where I think the natural state for the Ram is 1333; because A-Data stopped selling it shortly after bringing it to market. I suspect a few have had problems? I will check....
They now make a 2133MHz version of it.

 

[rogerthat1945]

I dont know what the problem is; but Battlefield 4 crashed again into some sticky mess after an hour for the hundredth time in three months.

I assumed it was overheating. But this time I ran temp monitors on my second screen instead of a map. 65C-CPU, 65C-GPU 50C-RAM Averages all through the game to crashing into some gluey sticky battlelog type box..

I dont know what the problem is. I tried asking there (after auto-repair attempts).

 

[Bo$$]

memtest.try.it

 

[timta2]

If I saw sparks coming from my hardware I would immediately turn the system off by pulling the power cord. I would not plug it back in until the problem was resolved.

 

[AsRock]

A friend of mine has had to have 2 of those mobo's replaced already and he's not even though 6 months warranty yet.. Although it's the USB ports which go on him with some other strange shit.

 

[erocker]

If I saw sparks coming from my hardware I would immediately turn the system off by pulling the power cord. I would not plug it back in until the problem was resolved.

^This.

Tear the system down and look for damage.

 

[rogerthat1945]

A friend of mine has had to have 2 of those mobo's replaced already and he's not even though 6 months warranty yet.. Although it's the USB ports which go on him with some other strange shit.

After I first bought the motherboard and ran it, I was forced to buy a powered USB after the PC kept crashing with my using all the the onboard USB ports for various printers etc. The Anker 7-port USB Hub seems fine. No USB crashes since, and with MS updates.

This issue though may have been a loose add-on Hard-drive cable not fully plugged into the motherboard...

Am testing the rig and BF4 again.

P.S.
separately, Memtest was ok at 7-passes. It took 7 hours to get that far though. Had to use the old 4.2 version as the 5.01 version refuses to boot function.

And as for the sparks, I have a spare Haswell i5 rig. And warranty.

....and I like sparks; they`re nearly fun mid Battlefield 4.

 

[rogerthat1945]

Update.
I discovered that the sparks came from the cable for the extra hard-drives which was loose, as I was removing the right side panel with the power on, which led to the sparks.

No damage.

The BF4 sticky issue & BF3 (DirectX) problem seems to have turned out to be because the regional settings for `non-unicode programs`? were not set to `English (USA)`.

It looks like the EA is coding to ensure we are forced to pretend we are in the US; as now I set my PC to the wrong country the games have no problems whatsoever.