How do you know if a PSU is failing?

[Chryonn]

Hello, me again. it seems my PC woes haven't ended. last month i reported on my PC randomly resetting/restarting itself while playing Steam games. i thought it was the RAM which it probably was with one bad stick, so i promptly set about buying 4Gb to place the 2Gb i had. all seemed fine until it started rebooting again, with the 4Gb.

now either i'm very unlucky with RAM or it's something else. i thought it might be the gfx card overheating so i used Rivatuner to crank up the percentage to 80% (it defaulted to 40% before RT).

same problem however. now i'm guessing it's one of two things: either the PSU is failing or the NB is getting too hot. i was trying to play another Steam game and the PC just turned itself off completely; my heart skipped a beat thinking the PSU had blown, but the keyboard LED was still on and mobo LED was on too. i've turned it back on and it's working all normal. i've been using Speedfan 4.40 to find out the temps inside and see if i can adjust the fan speeds.

but i've noticed something odd: +5V and +12V are normal but my -12V is reading -16.97V and my -5V is -8.78V. is this a bad sign that the PSU shuts itself off at load that its failing? it's an OCZ 1010W PSU, i can't remember the specific model something like GamerXtreme.

or could it be the NB that's getting too hot and it's shutting the PC down? i'd read somewhere else that the NB needs to be cooled, well i have an Asus P5N-E SLI which uses passive cooling for the NB/SB and VRMs. any expert opinions/suggestions as to what's happening?

 

[p_o_s_pc]

touch the heatsink on the NB under load. If it is too hot to stand to touch for 2seconds or more then you need to add some cooling to it. or you could use Asus's tool "Pc probe" to check the temps of the NB. As for the PSU it could be possible but for right now lets say it is unlikely for now till we get NB temps.
also you have anything overclocked?

 

[IronRuler]

Culprit seems to be the PSU

 

[Chryonn]

i don't overclock. yeah i'm thinking of placing the PC under load and see if it does the same thing. anyone have any suggestions for software that will do that?

 

[Sasqui]

I had a power supply fail and take a motherboard with it. All sorts of weird things happened to that PC up to the point of total failure. The most notable was screen issues and then lockups. Hope that helps.

 

[assaulter_99]

Well if that can help you, my last bad psu did some weird things with my pc. first off it started affecting my gpu, I needed to play cod:mw @ 800x600 and even that the gameplay was choppy. Later my pc shut down any time my gpu was under load. My advice, just dip in another PS to test it, otherwise you might end up very frustrated, especially since it can bring down other parts with it.

As for a software that might put your pc under stress, try prime95, it does a pretty good job at it.

 

[Chryonn]

the thing is, it works fine when doing little. a couple of days ago i was playing L4D2 for well over a couple of hours and it was fine, no resets. then i play Alien Swarm (on another day) and it would reset. yesterday i was trying to get into a Natural Selection 2 alpha game and the whole system shut down like i had a power cut, as i've written in my orig post, i knew the PSU wasn't dead because certain lights were still on.
i haven't been getting any gfx artefacts, nor freezes, just these seemingly random resets. today i went into BIOS and loaded up the defaults, i'll also need to manually input the timings for the RAM. see if that does anything. i'm loathe to think it might be the PSU. i don't have spares to swap in, no PSU, nor gfx card. i've just stuck my fonger on the NB cooler and it's quite warm, not hot enough to pull away from. if i can hook up a fan to that, i'll stress the PC

 

[assaulter_99]

If you say its quite warm, then its not bad, they are meant to be, since if you had NB heating like a nuclear reactor, you would have burnt your finger rofl! Anyways, good luck. But it will be hard pinpointing the problem since you don't have spares, that would have eased your job a tad bit.

 

[JATownes]

Agreed in testing a spare. Borrow one from a friend if you have to. My PSU voltages were weird and I was having BSOD issues a while back (and I had a cheapo Raidmax PSU), so I replaced it with a bad ass Corsair. A week later my MB crashed. Come to find out, the PSU was fine, it was the board. Lesson learned. Never assume what is failing. Be positive before ordering replacements. Good Luck.

 

[francis511]

It sorta sounds like the psu. But srsly 1010w ? How old is it ?

 

[ShRoOmAlIsTiC]

occt has a psu test, it will show you your rails and if they dip too far your computer will restart. try running that. I believe its occt 3.1.0

 

[Chryonn]

well 1010W is 1.01kW it's three years old when i bought it.

i've had a good look around on other forums and come to the conclusion that it's the PSU. in this link http://www.techsupportforum.com/har...extremely-difficult-issue-s-troubleshoot.html the guy Blindspy has the exact same issue i have if you look at Problem number 2 at the beginning, then at post number 13 he says that a new PSU fixed everything.