Quick check on PSU

Dyr

Dont wanna be posting problems that might seem straightforward, but has anyone seen a psu that decides to stop outputting enough juice? Ive only seen PSUs in two conditions, working and blown

my box at home started acting oddly over the last while, graphics card would occasionally flip out, pc would lock up overnight. I thought windows might need a wipe or the gfx card was gupped. BUT its now decided not to boot at all with a half decent graphics card in it (ge force mx460 or fx5200) or to boot up with a crappy TNT2 but still struggle and fail to bring the OS up, i can actually hear the hard disk struggle like a car going up a hill. Tried the hard disk and and gfx card in another pc and they worked first time

stick the fx5200 card in alone, no peripherals at all and it wont boot,wont even give a bios beep and sounds like its power cycling, you can actually see the tower LEDS flicker in time with the noise from the box as it tries to summon enough juice then seemingly fail. The fecking PSU is an Antec 380w, just over a year old, thats worked perfectly so far. Tried the box on another set of wall sockets too just to make sure its not the ould 'lectrics. So... any opinions on another possible source of the problem??

Chalk

dodgy ram?

dodgy ram causes all sorts of problems, that show up in diferent ways.
download memtest and boot up with it - http://www.memtest86.com/

or try some other ram .

Dyr

Ive been getting the bios to do a "full" memory check on boot but will give that a go too!
the PC is JUST out of warranty too :mad:

Sheridan

Just looking at the voltages in the bios now, all are slightly above normal except the 5 volt one which is at 4.43 V mostly. Anyone know if thats significant? never had to pay attention to those figures before

Dyr

oops that be me above..logged in on de little bros pc

Dyr

Might as well, update this, elara basically told me to return the PSU as it was still under warranty and replaced it with no quibble. Fair play to them

New PSU is working fine with gfx card, hardisks and cdrom, so it does appear that the old one was the problem. I'm thinking of sticking an S-ATA disk in as all the booting up and down and lack of sufficient juice seems to have really hammered the hard disks .