How do you know when your PSU is acting up?

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19 Nov 2004
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I had an old PC which I just upgraded. Mostly because it was really slow, but also because once in a while it would just blue screen or freeze - approximately 3-4 times per week. To be honest, I was pretty sure that the cause was the mobo, because I replaced that a few years back, and that seems to have been when the problems started. Anyway, I just decided to go the whole bang shoot and upgrade everything.

All high quality stuff: Gigabyte Z77 mobo, Intel i3570, 16gb Kingston ram, 7850 Sapphire graphics and 256gb Crucial M4 SSD.

Its been running fine for the past week, but then yesterday I got a random crash again, identical to the previous crashes. The only item that I have not replaced is the PSU - Corsair HX 620W - which is supposedly a very high quality item.

The only other thing I could possible think of is perhaps the actual electrical socket (or the 1-to-4 adapter) is dodgy. Could that even be a possibility?

Do the symptoms sounds typical for a dodgy PSU?
 
Some common symptoms

+ A big pop then a shutdown with refusal to start (this is more of a failure than "playing up"
+ Intermittant shutdowns
+ Graphics card blacking out momentarily, but the system staying alive (usually down to PSU not supplying enough power for a while at peak demand)
+ Graphics card anomalies (same as above, often attributed to a dodgy GPU, especially when a new less power hungry replacement card doesn't have the same issue)
 
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