Internal power problem?

ionapaul

Built first system this week and have already dealt with a DOA HD, now my PC started shutting down for no aparent reason a few times today. The first two times while running 3Dmark 2003 and just now (a few hours later) while running my first game ever of KOTOR. I assume that the power is shutting off because of system stress running these intensive programs - hasn't shut off for any other reasons yet. I bought what I thought was a very good PSU, 400w GOLD two-fan version, and have the following in the new case:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU with stock heatsink and fan
1024mb RAM with heatspreaders
ATI Radeon 9800 128mb with standard small onboard fan
80g S-ATA HD
3 case fans with neon lights
One DVD-CD-r combo drive
Floppy drive
Modem (not in use)
Extra neon cathode light (not in use)

I just connected everything to the power supply as best I could during build, not taking particular care of the order - does it matter that most of the fans are on one power connector from PSU while the combo drive, Radeon, and HD are all on the other power connector? Do I need to mix things up a little, as I guess the fans need much less energy as the other components. Thanks for any advice.

Tenshot

A friend bought a new motherboard during the week and is having similar problems to you. He has an MSI KT6 Delta, Athlon 3000+, ATI Radeon 9800, 2x256 MB 333 MHz DDR RAM, assorted hard drives + CD-RW, and a 400W PSU.

With the FSB set to 100 MHz, everything runs fine. Bumping it up to 166 MHz crashed as soon as he saved & exited the BIOS, or 10-20 seconds later. After some research, he tried setting the multiplier to Auto instead of 12.5x-13x, and this made things a bit better - it could reboot properly now and still show up as an Athlon 3000 in the boot screen. However, when he loads XP, it crashes just at the point where the main desktop should appear (after the loading screen vanishes), and the system just powers off.

He's probably going to get a 550W PSU and see if that sorts it, but if anyone has any better suggestions, let me know.

(Ironically, he bought the new board because his previous ABit board wouldn't boot with the Radeon installed at all.)

Col_Loki

Ok firstly what make is the PSU? from the description im guessing q-tec which is a bad thing, they give crazy ratings to there PSU's when there actual output is far lower.

You didnt say what motherboard you have, there should be a monitor with it like winbond monitor or asus probe. Install that and have a look at your voltage rails. While looking at your rails run "prime95" torture test which will stress your CPU and memory and in turn the PSU. Watch for variation in the rails (ie drop in output) and see what the figures are when she re-starts.

Quite possibly the PSU as its a power hungry system. Its all about brands when it come to PSU's always ignore the rating especially on no-namers.

[edit] What you want is a decent PSU with a 350W + rating. Im running an overclocked system on a 300w fortron PSU....... its all about brands.

Best makes .... Antec, Be-quiet, Fortron, thermaltake, enermax, Zalman, ..... with them you cant really go wrong. The quieter ones being the Zalmans, Be-quiets and fortrons (if you mod them) . Oh and the 380w single fan Antec.

neokenzo

His mobo is MSI K8T Neo-FISR as said on his sig

ionapaul

Yeah, PSU is the Q-Tec Gold Dual-Fan 400w I guess the fact this was the 'gold' version instead of 'standard' seemed to be good to me - if I keep having this problem I guess I will just buy a better brand and keep this for a spare... I also re-connected the inner power branches to better distribute the components, now combo drive, one case fan, and HDD on one, video card, floppy, and two case fans on other. Finger's crossed.