PC stability & performance woes fixed.
Finally managed to nail down the issue that was making my PC reboot without displaying an error at random while gaming or doing something else performance intensive, like using Photoshop and watching HD movies, the problem has gradually grown worse since the day I built this machine a couple months ago, at first it was really infrequent and not that bothersome, but lately it crashed 5-15mins after starting a game and that’s not acceptable.
I went over the RAM settings on the official Corsair forums and got a thumbs up, I also removed all but one stick and switched between the 4 sticks when that didn’t help, I under clocked the GPU and CPU, I tried putting a hulking big fan next to the case and re-seated all heat sinks with new paste despite all temperatures being reported as sub 50C.
I was about to give up when I finally turned to what I should have checked at the start, the power supply. It’s a good one “Hiper HPU-4S730 Type-R Omnigrid II 730W” so I disregarded it as the cause from the start, something I shouldn’t have done, I checked the reported voltages in the bios and with AsusProbe in windows, both agreed that my voltages were dipping from time to time way too low for comfort.
I don’t know if my PC simply has outgrown it’s power supply or if it’s is weak on one or more rails, I thought my load balance between the rails was quite good and I tried switching it around a bit including putting the SLI power connector in the other port available on the PSU, didn’t help.
My old PC (P4 Prescott, 9800pro) used a 400W Zalman power supply which I kept, sadly it was in the junker rig running XP I was using as a server and IE6 testing environment via VNC (a form of remote desktop) for my designs (all my other machines run Vista, which can’t run IE6), I got another even older PSU that’s sufficient to run it but it’s the wrong shape, none of the screw holes match a regular ATX power supply (comes out of a desktop IBM machine), so I’ll have to put it in the bottom of the case, that’s fine as long as you don’t need to carry it around.
I cut one of the black leads and the green lead on the thick motherboard cable bundle coming out of the 400W and soldered them together to make it start when it gets power without the need for a motherboard to trigger a power up, I put the Graphics card and all drives on the 400w power supply and left the motherboard, fan controller etc on the 730w and sure enough, my system is 100% stable even during heavy load, I’ve gradually gone from downclock to raging overclock and it’s still stable and cool. :)
My full current specs can be seen here.
