I just upgraded from a flaky Gigabyte 7VRX KT333 to an MSI K7N2 nForce2. One of the reasons I did this was because the Gigabyte had a strange issue where, if I turned on the PC after doing a soft shutdown, the keyboard wouldn't work. Sometimes the keyboard lights would all light up and stay that way, even when the power was off. The BIOS never detected a problem with the keyboard, it happily let me into Windows, where I then discovered that I was unable to type. I wrote this off as being due to a bad motherboard (this particular revision was plagued with problems) and worked around it by turning the power off, then on, at the psu or wall before I turned the computer on.
Aside from that, the system had become really unstable in the past month or so, with on average one spontaneous reboot every 24 hours.
So I installed the new motherboard, and of course, all three lights on the keyboard lit up, and it failed to work. It was the same issue but even worse, as a simple flick of the PSU switch didn't fix it - it took about 20 tries to get the keyboard to work properly. After that, all seemed well, and I installed Windows. I'm now finding out that it's just as unstable as before, with reboots happening fairly regularly.
I never suspected my PSU before now because it's never given me any trouble. It's a 300w AOpen which came with my case (I believe it's a rebadged Fortron/Sparkle) which always gave superb voltages. Now, though, they seem a little off. Speedfan gives:
Vcore (1.6v): 1.58V
+12V: 12.59V
3.3V: 3.04V
5Vsb: 4.88
Everest gives similar values except a wildly fluctuating ~2V for the 12V rail, which doesn't quite seem right. Obviously that 3.3V is suspicious, but I remember it being fairly dead on on the previous motherboard, so I'm not sure.
Everything certainly seems to add up to a bad PSU, so I'm looking to replace it, but I'd like to know if there's anything else that could be happening to cause such specific behaviour on two separate motherboards. It's not memory and it's not temperatures. The CPU (1700+ tbred-b) hasn't changed, and indeed the keyboard issue started when I got this CPU, but I'm not sure that a CPU could cause issues with keyboard lights staying on when the power is off. I won't be able to return the PSU that I'm buying so if anyone's had any experience with ANYTHING like this before, please explain what it was. It's possible that I'm just incompetent at installing motherboards and managed to make the same odd mistake twice.
Aside from that, the system had become really unstable in the past month or so, with on average one spontaneous reboot every 24 hours.
So I installed the new motherboard, and of course, all three lights on the keyboard lit up, and it failed to work. It was the same issue but even worse, as a simple flick of the PSU switch didn't fix it - it took about 20 tries to get the keyboard to work properly. After that, all seemed well, and I installed Windows. I'm now finding out that it's just as unstable as before, with reboots happening fairly regularly.
I never suspected my PSU before now because it's never given me any trouble. It's a 300w AOpen which came with my case (I believe it's a rebadged Fortron/Sparkle) which always gave superb voltages. Now, though, they seem a little off. Speedfan gives:
Vcore (1.6v): 1.58V
+12V: 12.59V
3.3V: 3.04V
5Vsb: 4.88
Everest gives similar values except a wildly fluctuating ~2V for the 12V rail, which doesn't quite seem right. Obviously that 3.3V is suspicious, but I remember it being fairly dead on on the previous motherboard, so I'm not sure.
Everything certainly seems to add up to a bad PSU, so I'm looking to replace it, but I'd like to know if there's anything else that could be happening to cause such specific behaviour on two separate motherboards. It's not memory and it's not temperatures. The CPU (1700+ tbred-b) hasn't changed, and indeed the keyboard issue started when I got this CPU, but I'm not sure that a CPU could cause issues with keyboard lights staying on when the power is off. I won't be able to return the PSU that I'm buying so if anyone's had any experience with ANYTHING like this before, please explain what it was. It's possible that I'm just incompetent at installing motherboards and managed to make the same odd mistake twice.
