Power surges causing restarts...

[nwo]

I have had several power surges that cause my PC to reboot. At first it usually occurred when I messed with the USB ports in the rear of the PC because the backplate was not properly installed (the rear exhaust fan power cord got caught up in it). However, tonight I was just using my PC for the usual mining + youtube and it rebooted me to the POST screen saying power surges have been detected and PC was reset to protect it.

Since then, I have underclocked my cards a bit and I also got over my laziness and unscrewed the motherboard to fix the backplate issue.

I also wanted to find out if the PSU could cause my graphics cards to have artifacts under load? I have been having artifacts with my Powercolor 7970 and I filed an RMA because of it. I would sometimes get screen flickering when starting cg miner or a game (BF4). Other times, I would have PC crashes or most recently my screen was completely brown with grey lines all over it. I still have not sent it and now I am having seconds thoughts.

I tried gaming on my other card in the same rig (7950) and although I haven't had any artifacts, I did have a random crash as well as a PC reboot during a gaming session where I left my 7970 mining.

Unfortunately I do not have a spare 700W+ PSU to replace this one with and test to see if it will get rid of my artifacts and PC reboots.

I leave my PC on for mining 24/7 and it is almost guaranteed to need attention at least twice per day either because it reboots or it stops mining and when I come back to my PC, my screen says no video signal.

Does it sound like a PSU issue or a video card issue?

Edit: I forgot to mention that I do have a surge protector, could it be possible that it's not doing its job?

 

[Torn Mind]

What PSU and mobo do you have?

Surge protectors divert current away if voltage gets too high. Anything surges upstream from the surge protector can be diverted, but any surges downstream from the protector can't be affected by the surge protector.

If it is the motherboard surge protection kicking it, then it could be that the DC output from the PSU, which is downstream from the surge strip, is not quite in spec for some reason, perhaps for a brief but significant period of time. It also could be that the surge protector, which are likely a bunch of metal oxide varistors that eventually do fail, is indeed dead and your wall power is all over the place.

A poorly filtered signal can cause GPUs to artifact or stop displaying an image altoghether, although failure of the GPU's own capacitors would be more likely to do that...

In addition, there is an outside chance the motherboard might be flaky somewhere.

 

[nwo]

I have a Corsair TX 750 80+ (version 1) which is refurbished, about a month old. Motherboard is Asus z87-a which I bought brand new at MC about 3 months ago.

The first step I have taken to troubleshoot the issue I mentioned in the OP (downclocked my 7950 and fixed the backplate issue). So far, there have not been any restarts and my PC has been mining without interruption since last night.

It is too soon to tell if the issue has been resolved, since the restarts can sometimes occur as frequently as every hour or so or as seldom as once every couple of days. The fact that I am not around each time an issue occurs also makes it a little bit more difficult to troubleshoot.

The surge protector is fairly old, but it's not a cheap unit. I think the next step would be to try another surge protector if I keep getting the same message on restarts.

Edit: My worker is offline again which means I'm still having issues

Any suggestions on the text step I should take to troubleshoot this issue?

edit 2: Got home, PC was still on... both cg miners stopped mining and had current hashrates frozen... I hate it when this happens... I guess I have to configure cgwatcher now...