Bizarre Restart

[Phenomenologica]

Short version, I was measuring up the front of my case with a piece of dense foam as a template, and it slipped and through the pressure from my front fan attached itself to the air intake at the front of the computer, covering the vent. I removed it after literally less than a second, looked up, and was surprised to find my computer had shut down and was busy rebooting. It went through a disk check but I assume that's because I was running a defrag at the time it shut itself down.

I'm quite curious what could have caused this. My first thought was that as the vent was blocked the fans drew more current than usual to try to contest with the change in pressure, but I'm not convinced they'd be capable of drawing enough power to cause a reboot of my system. I have two intake fans (One on the front that was blocked, one on the side that wasn't) and two outtakes (Both on the back), plus the CPU and GPU fans inside.

Is it possible it was some kind of automated shut down related to the fan speed? I have three fans including the front intake hooked up to the CPU fan header via a PWM splitter, so is it possible the sudden change in speed of one of the fans was reported and triggered some kind of safety feature? Or could it have been a spectacular coincidence?

 

[stulid]

It could be simpler than this, you may have just knocked/touched the reset button in your hurry to remove the foam

 

[PhillyDee]

Or just a coincidence! I have blocked loads of fans without problems. Both with pieces of paper, and fingers.

 

[Phenomenologica]

The reset button is hidden under a hard plastic cover that was closed, and I'm certain I didn't hit the power button. Besides, the power button would have shut the computer down far more slowly and not landed me with a disk check. Nice idea, though! As to coincidence, my computer hasn't randomly shut down on me since I got it a couple of months ago. It's statistically improbable it would choose to do so in that half a second!