Could it be the Power Supply?

[Jerry944T]

My system has been spontaneously rebooting lately and has been having trouble cold booting. I have an Asus motherboard, 2800Barton chip, 1GB RAM, 2 burners, two 7200RPM Maxtor hard drives, an ATI 9600XT video card, 3 case fans, and numerous USB devices. All this in an Antec case with a 330 watt TruPower power supply.

Is it possible that this problem is caused by an inadequate power supply and is there a guide that tells you how much power you need to run all these devices?

TIA for any help or suggestions.

Jerry

 

[Navid]

You can access datatsheets for all those components and find out how much current each of them draws from the 12V rail. Add them all up and see if your power supply can support that current.
You can also use a volt meter and measure the 12V rail voltage (from one of the molex connectors) while you are running prime95 or a 3D application and see if the voltage drops too much.
Then, you will know if there is a problem with the power supply or not.

 

[Fern]

is there a guide that tells you how much power you need to run all these devices?

Here's LINK to a PSU calculator. It's said to overestimate though. Prolly cuz there's so many cheap psu's out there that overstate their output.

Fern

 

[CraigRT]

It does sound like a power supply issue if you ask me.......

 

[Jerry944T]

Thanks Fern for the handy chart. According to the chart I have 30 watts in reserve if, in fact, I'm getting a true 330 watts.

I guess the real question is, can a power supply be responsible for difficulty in booting and spontaneous reboots?

Inquiring minds need too know.

Thanks again.

 

[x2ThorsHammer2x]

It sounds like it could be a PSU problem, heat problem (depending on the cfm rating of the fans), or what happened to me, an bios driver update. my bios drivers had a conflict with some hardware and rebooted quite often. check asus's website for updates. another thing to look for is the power rating at different temps. if the PSU is really hot, it wont have as much of a power output. check the ratings of power output at different ratings and the temp inside your case.

 

[Fern]

Hey Jerry,

Motherboard Monitor 5 may be of help here. It has the ability to monitor your voltage rails periodically (ex, every second, or 5 seconds, or whatever interval you choose). It will write it to a text file file. After a reboot you can go in and check if your rails were fluctuating too much (thus the cause of reboots).

After installing it, look to the lower left of the MBM5 screen for "sys log" or similar to set up this feature.