PCA Forums

if you read my "upgrade" thread you'll remember I snagged a GTX280 recently, running on a 550W PSU, and I didn't have the proper 8 pin PCI-E power plug so I'm using the "not recommended" 2 6-pin to 1 8-pin adapter. Anyway, it was fine for 2 weeks, after being away for a weekend I come home last night, turn on the comp, and every so often it would just reboot, happened a few times, I thought Ok I'll troubleshoot tomorrow and left it on overnight.

I wake up to my comp constantly rebooting. it would start, I would hear the fans spin up, then reboot. so I shut it down, unplugged the power, checked a few things, hopped on the laptop for about 15 minutes, then tried my comp again, and it started just fine. been running for a couple hours OK, tried a few games, all OK. seems to me the PSU was failing, was about to run out for a new one, but now I dunno? stupid thing, wish it would either work or not, not this flaky stuff!

I ran CPUID HWM and got these voltages:

+5v is at 4.58v
+12v is at 12.88v
+3.3v is at 3.23v

so how bad is it?

the 5v seems a little low. you should check the voltages with a meter its more accurate.

5 and 12 volt are out of spec. They should be within 5%. Of course as Shadow said a meter will be more accurate.

What you describe is either a PSU or a mobo issue. Could be the mobo auto-shutting down to protect itself from bad voltages, or could be as simple as a short in the power or reset switch.

How old is the PSU if it has a few years and it's out of warranty you might want to open it and see if there's any bad caps (swollen or leaking).

But yeah, my gut feeling is you have a bad PSU and if those voltages are correct you need to swap it out before that hot 12 volt rail does some damage.

put in a new PSU, flashed the BIOS to the latest version and that went OK, couple other small maintenance items done and no reboots for about 18 hours, looks good