| Forum Home | ||||
| Press F1 | ||||
| Thread ID: 121186 | 2011-10-15 03:48:00 | Suspected underrated power supply... can you shed any light? | mookster1 (15854) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 1237664 | 2011-10-15 03:48:00 | Hey all, A while since I've been on here (by the way kudos to the site designers... this looks great! :thumbs:) but I have an issue. I think that my power supply may be stressing out under load and consequently shutting down during inopportune occasions. It's a 400W SuperPower power supply (not too sure if this is a brand to steer clear of) and when I do any rendering in Blender, it konks out halfway through (the symptoms are exactly the same as pressing and holding the power supply button; kerCHun... as the fans shut down, and the monitor turns off along with the Power light on the front.) I have recently installed a graphics card (works really well... it's a Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT which I got at a garage sale for the princely sum of $65, and it beats integrated graphics hands-down!) but the same issues were occurring beforehand. This only really occurs during times of high load (before I posted this I was about to buzz someone in a little Cessna with my Mustang on Flight Simulator X and the power supply died) and as I say only happened before when I was rendering a fairly complex scene in Blender. The machine has 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 2.8GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor and a Gigabyte GA-something-a-rather motherboard (I'll have to take the cover off to have a look, I had a bit of paper with it on but I cannot find it.) I don't really want to go out and buy another power supply if I don't have to, hence why I am asking. Thanks! :) |
mookster1 (15854) | ||
| 1237665 | 2011-10-15 04:55:00 | and the monitor turns off along with the Power light on the front Is the monitor power cable plugged into the PSU? |
jareemon (5207) | ||
| 1237666 | 2011-10-15 20:13:00 | It would be useful to check your temperatures as well. Here's a good article to read windowssecrets.com Report back your temps. |
linw (53) | ||
| 1237667 | 2011-10-15 23:07:00 | Yup, will do. BTW the monitor power cable is plugged directly into the power board (i.e. not thru the power supply unit) and as I undusted everything not too long ago dust doesn't seem to be the problem. Thanks for your help, and I'll get back on here when I run the test. | mookster1 (15854) | ||
| 1237668 | 2011-10-15 23:09:00 | Oh yeah, what I meant to say about the monitor turning off is that it goes into standby as if the computer is shut down... sorry about not being too clear about that! As for the Power light on the front of the computer that goes out, so it's definitely shutting down for some reason. | mookster1 (15854) | ||
| 1237669 | 2011-10-15 23:10:00 | Hey all, 400W SuperPower power supply 2GB of DDR2 RAM, a 2.8GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor Rather underpowered for rendering. More RAM< More CPU. As for the PSU, ick, most brand are to be avoided, some good brands are: Corasir Enermax Antec And dust - did you get it all out of the fins in the CPU heatsink? Did you get it out of the inside of the PSU? Most people don't even look at those places. |
pctek (84) | ||
| 1237670 | 2011-10-15 23:19:00 | Could be CPU temperature but "SuperPower" doesn't sound like any PSU I've ever heard of that was any good, so it's not a bad choice to point the finger at it. | Agent_24 (57) | ||
| 1237671 | 2011-10-15 23:25:00 | Hello again Yes I did clean out the fins on the CPU heatsink, and I looked in the power supply (I didn't open it of course) and it didn't appear to have much dust and stuff in it. SuperPower does sound like a fly-by-night, gone-by-morning brand (pcworld certainly haven't touched their stuff AFAIK) so that's the first thing that came to my mind. |
mookster1 (15854) | ||
| 1237672 | 2011-10-15 23:38:00 | Borrow a better one if you can, if that solves your problem, buy something decent, a Corsair if you need something cheap. | Agent_24 (57) | ||
| 1237673 | 2011-10-16 00:30:00 | That's what I was thinking of doing and I have access to a bigger, better 600W power supply, but unfortunately it's not sufficiently new enough to have an ATX12V plug to give 12 volts to the processor, which sucks (it was out of a defunct server that got replaced in 2005). I'll run those temperature checks and see if that tells me anything. | mookster1 (15854) | ||
| 1 2 3 | |||||