[Alwinp]

Since a few weeks my rig has been fed with shutdown troubles. and just recently it showed up alot more often.

I made a thread in the general amd section a while back. but after some checking im 99% sure my PSU is probably the reason.
Link to thread: http://www.overclock.net/amd-general...ml#post8811026
Basicly, my rig shuts down at random times. Sometimes I can use my rig for hours and sometimes I cant even get passed the bios check screen before it shuts down again.

There's a few things that confuse me though. And I would like to make sure if a PSU can cause the two following things ive encountered.
1. Sometimes it completely shuts down like when theres a power shutdown. It just turns off in a sec and done. But sometimes it first closes all the applications i have running and then just logs off windows and eventually turns the power off.

2. Since two days back my rig also managed to turn itself on & and off frequently. I was sleeping when I suddenly woke up by the noise of my rig powering up, then shutting down. This kept going on for a while. Sometimes I powered off the PSU and sometimes it just stopped booting up by itself eventually.
note: I had turned off my PC when i went to bed and not in sleep mode or anything.

I dont really have another PSU to clearly test this, my friends dont have PSU powerfull enough to fully power up my rig (no 6pin connectors) and I don't wanna end up buying a new PSU when it could easely be my motherboard or something else causing this.

So yeah, just want to make sure if PSU's can cause strange stuff like this to happen.
Thanks in advance!

 

[cccp]

The psu can definitely be a problem as it was for me less than a week ago. Your describing what was happening to my pc until I changed my psu. So your best option is to check your psu by replacing it with a new one or just use one that you might have lying around, just as I did. I was planning to buy a new motherboard thinking that was my problem but then I went to a store that fixes computers and they gave me a tip saying that it could be a psu problem. Also, I learned that it is common for a psu to go first.

 

[Iroh]

I have an Antec PSU in an old PC that behaves oddly. Plug it in and power it up, and it'll run just fine. Power down the computer, and it'll pulse the 12v line about once a second, just enough to keep the fans turning and give a fantastic LED light show. Need to unplug to save the hardware.

This computer had all sorts of random shutdowns when I first built it. I thought I was getting thermal shutdown all the time for about two months and replaced CPU cooler (eventually with H50) and added a video card (to take load off the chipset). One night I was just watching a movie on one monitor and browsing OCN on the other, while serving multimedia across LAN to another computer, when the computer went *POP* and the audio skipped like a broken record. Yup, that Antec self-destructed too. I wasn't too unhappy because the 130F air it always pumped out since I bought it 4+ years ago was not too nice to the air conditioning bill.

Replaced a power supply a few years ago on an OLD computer, a 25MHz 80386 that would run fine until a few hours in when the screen would go black. When I found that playing DOS games would speed that process up I tried a different power supply and it fixed it.

There's another computer I work on that has a BFG power supply. It does NOT like interference on the power line. Every time I kick on the laser printer in the other room that computer goes into standby, whether idling, in a game, or whatever.

So yeah the power supply is the root of all problems when the problems have no root. The best analogy is what a car engineer once told me-- the worst problem to diagnose is when the power rail of the engine computer pushes the wrong voltage because every sensor is designed to give certain readings at a set voltage, and when that voltage is wrong, there can be thirty sensor "failures" that send you chasing through the whole harness.

If your power supply isn't giving the right voltages, the computer doesn't know what it's doing and you're going to get unpredictable untraceable oddities.

 

[Alwinp]

Thanks for the replies.