Frying Power Supplies

[Kilau]

I had to do a partial rebuild on a my computer due to some unknown reason it had stopped booting. I purchased a GA-K8NS pro motherboard, a AMD 64 3400+ and a new case with 450W Power Supply. After moving my video card (Geforce 4 Ti4600) my hard drive, cd-rom and memory (512MB stick DDR333). I set about installing windows xp again. After about 2-3 hours of the system running fine and finally getting all the windows updates (minus sp2) and installing drivers I was ready to play some Everquest.

45 mins into the game the machine died with a loud pop and an acrid smell, I thought super I got a bad CPU but realized it was my 450W power supply that died...so I threw in my old 300W power supply the machine worked fine and I loaded up Everquest again...5 mins later that power supply dies. On my 3rd power supply now a 350W from Best Buy and haven't run a game yet but I have updated the bios and I am using the system right now. I don't want to keep blowing out any power supply I put in here but I can't figure out what the heck is going on here.

The only odd thing I can see is that the boot screen says the CPU clock frequency is 200MHz, which should say something like 2.4Ghz I would think. Really could use some help here, I don't have tons of cash to throw at replacement parts and would very much like to have a working machine again.

Thank you.

 

[Smilin]

Bad power out the wall?

FYI that cpu clock freqency is probably right. That's the front side bus frequency and the cpu runs off a multiplier of that (12x in your case).

 

[quentinterintino]

Check the voltage/current out of the wall and double check that your PS is set to 115Volts, not 230? Good luck

 

[Kilau]

Yeah the power supplies are always set to 115V, the wall outlet should be fine. It has been fine for a long time now and everything is pluged into a surge protector, nothing else is blowing.

The system will run fine in Windows, this only seems to happen when its under a load, like playing a game.

Thanks Smilin for helping me understand the multiplier deal, not used to seeing it presented that way. 12x200 = 2.4Ghz