Hi everyone,
Some friends of mine are having really strange problems with power supplies, and I was wondering if I could run what happened by you guys to see what you think. Bare with me, it's a long story.
A little while ago a friend of mine's psu blew. It was cheap and nasty, he accepted that and replaced it with a good corsair psu (650W powering a phenom 2 x4, single GTS 450 etc).
Following this he had issues with his graphics card. The screen would randomly go black and you would have to reset the computer to do anything. It seemed to happen more often when gaming or doing anything graphically intensive. We also tried the gpu in my computer and the same thing happened again, so we assumed it was dead. If it makes any difference, the card is a KFA2 GTS 450.
He RMA'ed the card back to the manufacturer and they found nothing wrong with it. After testing they had no issues and sent back the same card.
He had since replaced his card, and so assuming that the card was actually ok gave it to his girlfriend. Since then, two power supplies have blown in her computer in the space of 4 weeks! One being another cheap and nasty psu, the other being a corsair. The computer had been running fine with an older graphics card for quite some time before this happened too, and the 450 didn't have any of the black screen problems like with my computer or his.
We tried running the girlfriend's computer out of the case to check for shortages and the latest broken corsair still didn't work. Given that I don't think two psu's blowing in such a short space of time is due to chance I'd rather not try any others for now!
So I guess really it boils down to a couple of questions:
1) Do you think a graphics card could blow up a power supply, or am I finding connections that aren't there? In all the systems it's been in it's had psu's which had ample wattage to run it (600W-650W). It's also the only thing that both computers have in common.
2)If not the graphics card, what else could it be? How could we go about testing it?
The rest of the spec for the girlfriend's computer:
CPU: Athlon X2 6000+
Mobo: Gigabyte M68M-S2P AM2+
RAM: 2gb DDR2
Thanks guys in advance
Some friends of mine are having really strange problems with power supplies, and I was wondering if I could run what happened by you guys to see what you think. Bare with me, it's a long story.
A little while ago a friend of mine's psu blew. It was cheap and nasty, he accepted that and replaced it with a good corsair psu (650W powering a phenom 2 x4, single GTS 450 etc).
Following this he had issues with his graphics card. The screen would randomly go black and you would have to reset the computer to do anything. It seemed to happen more often when gaming or doing anything graphically intensive. We also tried the gpu in my computer and the same thing happened again, so we assumed it was dead. If it makes any difference, the card is a KFA2 GTS 450.
He RMA'ed the card back to the manufacturer and they found nothing wrong with it. After testing they had no issues and sent back the same card.
He had since replaced his card, and so assuming that the card was actually ok gave it to his girlfriend. Since then, two power supplies have blown in her computer in the space of 4 weeks! One being another cheap and nasty psu, the other being a corsair. The computer had been running fine with an older graphics card for quite some time before this happened too, and the 450 didn't have any of the black screen problems like with my computer or his.
We tried running the girlfriend's computer out of the case to check for shortages and the latest broken corsair still didn't work. Given that I don't think two psu's blowing in such a short space of time is due to chance I'd rather not try any others for now!
So I guess really it boils down to a couple of questions:
1) Do you think a graphics card could blow up a power supply, or am I finding connections that aren't there? In all the systems it's been in it's had psu's which had ample wattage to run it (600W-650W). It's also the only thing that both computers have in common.
2)If not the graphics card, what else could it be? How could we go about testing it?
The rest of the spec for the girlfriend's computer:
CPU: Athlon X2 6000+
Mobo: Gigabyte M68M-S2P AM2+
RAM: 2gb DDR2
Thanks guys in advance
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