Insufficient power?

[mattross]

I have posted about this before believing the problem to be with other components, but I'm now thinking I have insufficient juice from my Tagan TG-530-U15 modular PSU.

I have:

Lian-Li PC1100b case
Asus A8N-SLI Premium mobo
AMD 3800+ X2 dual core CPU + Scythe Shogun with 12cm fan
Mushkin XPS black 250MHz 1GBx2 RAM
2x WD raptor 64GB SATA RAID 0 for C:
2x Seagate 750GB SATA, one in an Icy Box external enclosure powered separately
1x WD 320GB
BFG 7800GTX PCI-E graphics card
HDA-Mystique PCI soundcard
Pinnacle 300i PCI TV tuner
1x PCI NEC-chipset USB2 card with 4 ports
2x DVD burners, NEC-4550A & TSSTCorp SH-S203B
3.5" Floppy drive
Logitech MX5000 bluetooth dongle for keyboard/mouse
Dell 2407WFP monitor with in-built USB hub

This system has been added to over the last couple of years but I've been having stability issues for most of that time. Currently I have the onboard USB entirely disabled as it's a BSOD nightmare. Even using a PCI USB2 card it was still bad overclocked at 2.4GHz. The RAM never fulfilled its 250MHz FSB potential struggling to maintain 240MHz at looser than advertised timings.

Currently it's running reasonably stable at 2.2GHz but I still have odd problems that mainly relate to USB devices that malfunction after the PC has been up over a week. If I turn off my monitor every night it tends to cause more issues as the hub and card reader are deactivated. Some days they will not come back up without powering down the whole PC. Usually I only reboot about once a fortnight if I can get away with it.

Looking at an online PSU calculator my setup came to within 50W of 530W. Before I buy a bigger 750-800W PSU does anyone think this is a possible cause of my PC problems?

 

[Admiral Huddy]

I would say yes..

The only way to be certain is to strip down your machine to bare essentials and test. Disconnect the power from some of those HDD (use only the boot HDD), both optical drives, remove the sound card and other PCI cards etc.. Make sure you are basically running with what's necessary, then start adding bits back one by one. If the system is stable when stripped to bare essentials but run into problems when adding back, then the problem is inadequate power.

 

[MadMatty]

Im having issues with my 530w modular also. ive noticed that 12v constaly dips below 11.70 when running gfx intensive games. i thaught combines mode switch should sort it but it drops even lower to 11.30 !

Ive set up an rma for it so hopefully theyll see its an issue and replace it. (its 13 months old). A freind of mine has the same system as me but with a radeon 2900xt and his 12v doesnt dip below 11.90 (usualy sits comfortably at 11.98) so im hopeful that mine was from an older problamatic batch.

 

[IAmATeaf]

If the PSU has been manufactured using the new tighter 5% tolerances then 11.30 is outside of that but might be worth checking with any manual you have for the PSU just in case.

 

[Lanz]

Having that much different hardware and expecting the PC to remain stable over long periods might be something that cant be fixed. Specially with an Nforce chipset, as they were just never as stable as the Intel equivalent.

TBH, I doubt a new PSU would fix you're problem, you'd be better off selling the motherboard/cpu and memory and buying something new. It would probably be an almost free upgrade to a C2D, as your parts still have some value.