Am I asking too much of my PSU?

[shaamone]

I'm running the following setup in an Arctic Cooling Silentium T1 case with the standard PSU (350w)..

Abit NF3 motherboard
512Mb Corsair RAM
Sempron 2800+ Overclocked to 2GHz
TNT2 AGP Vid card (32Mb)
1x extra IDE controller
2x Hauppauge Nova-T TV cards
1x Old bt878 TV capture card
3x 7200rpm 200Gb HD's (Software raid 5 in ubuntu linux)
1x 7200rpm 40Gb HD (system)
1x DVD Burner

After system lockups I decided to lump another PSU in there (on top currently) to help ease the strain during busy disk activity, it currently powers the 3x 200Gb hard drives. Problem solved I thought, but upon copying some files to the array I had it hang again Suffice to say it's testing the reliability of software Raid 5 at the moment because the array seems to be rebuilding itself..

Any other suggestions on where my freezing problems may be coming from?

 

[Yewen]

Well, the PSU is on the limits of what I would run it, how about just trying the bare minimum to get the system to run, take out all the cards and storage drives, then see if it is unstable.

If it is stable then it is most likely the PSU copping out.

Only problem is replacing the PSU in that case.

 

[shaamone]

Well that's it. I did have the system running stable for about a fortnight (on constantly) at the 2GHz overclock with the bare minimum in there, so I'm pretty sure the power is causing my problem. However it's a little worrying that with an extra psu installed I got a crash!

At the time everything but the three 200Gb discs was running from the T1's psu, maybe still too much as I had a 60Gb hard drive running on (and powered by) usb at the time too.

I'm thinking about buying a 400w Akasa PSU and sticking it in the top of the case, there's space and the fan setup on that psu shouldn't disrupt the airflow of the T1 too much if I place it correctly..

Once that's in I'll let one PSU cope with the mobo & cards & the other deal with all the mechanical bits. Here's hoping I don't cook everything!

 

[Yewen]

It could just be your overclock, try running it at stock.

And yes you can have a overclock degrade, I know a lot of people who suddenly have issues with there overclocks.

Could also be the ram that is faulty.

 

[shaamone]

I've been running it back at stock speed for about 12hrs now, managed to take 60 gig off my USB HD without any issues. Starting to think it might just be my overclock.

I'll take off the extra power supply and see how she runs over the next week.

Thanks for the help Yewen, you may well have just saved me £50!

 

[GAMEfreak]

Psu wattage calculator

to find out if this is a wattage issue, use this and stick your spec in, should help . in the case of processor choose 1.40volts, and make sure to take capacitor degradation and voltage spikes into consideration.

 

[shaamone]

cool util, thanks

Seems I'm running pretty close to the edge but not pushing it in any way, with everything I can think of including capacitor aging I'm running close to 330Watts..

Apparently my PSU will do a peak output of 450Watts (350W standard) which should handle discs spinning up etc.

I've taken the overclock off. In hindsight I should have left it stock all along as I really need this machine to be 100% stable as it will be handling TV for the whole house & file serving etc, probably a bit of webserving too..

So far it has been running for over 24hrs without any problems. I did a few load tests last night, copying files from DVD whilst making huge archives and it seemed to handle it very well so here's hoping it's ok now.

Thanks for the help guys!