I beleive computer related threads are supposed to go here.
My computer has had upgrades since I bought it. Now it has…
Geforce GTX 295.
Sound blaster xfi gamer
8gb 1066 ram (running at 800)
two ‘ordinary’ 500gb drives.
One caviar black 1tb WD drive (I beleive these are power hungry)
Lately I get the ‘overclocking failed’ bios error, and a lot of bluescreens. Tonight I came home to find my computer on some kind of pre-windows screen saying ‘looking for usb devices…’ so I assume it’d bluescreened and restarted.
Should I get a more powerful PSU?
ETA: Does having the side-panel off make things cooler, or does it paradoxically make things warmer due to ‘incorrect’ air flow?
try this: http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html. There are probably others on the web. I just made some guesses about your mb and cpu (this is probably your next largest power need after the gpu) and came up with 856W.
Why don’t you do the following:
turn off the pc
remove the soundcard
remove 6gb of memory
remove the 1tb and a 500gb HD (or just keep the one where you installed the o/s)
remove absolutely anything else that is not absolutely necessary for the function of the pc
turn on the pc, get into the bios
load failsafe defaults
save and restart
see how stable your pc is
if stable start adding back in the soundcard/HDs/anything else but the memory
if stable with all parts but the memory then start loading up to keep it dual channel. Each time you add in a pair of sticks then do memtest to make sure your memory is ok
if it destabilizes and all the parts are in good shape then get a 1000W psu
If nothing happens maybe a setting got messed up.
I think it would hurt your temps to remove the side panel because of air flow, but try running coretemp with and without the side panel and see for yourself
While obviously troubleshooting is the only way to verify it, I agree with this statement. It’s extremely unlikely that with your current setup your problems are because of insufficient wattage. If you’re using the PSU that came bundled with the case, get rid of it - it’s guaranteed to suck.
Regarding the removal of your side-panel, it really depends on the user. Personally I get a few extra degrees of cooling with it off, but my case fans don’t move very much air. Download a temperature monitoring application and check it out! A box fan pointed into the case is a highly underrated, highly effective way to drop temperatures.
Do you know the amperage ratings for your power supply, by any chance? The specs I was able to find for the GTX 295 mention that you will need at least 50 amps on the 12V rail to power it adequately, and with all those other peripherals on the same rail you might well be looking at something like a 65 amp power draw in total, which is fairly high and possibly more than a cheap power supply can handle.
50 amps on a 12V rail is 600 watts. The actual draw of the GTX 295 won’t be more than something like 200 watts. (Note: I didn’t look it up, but 200 watts would be on the high side for even bleeding edge cards.) Throw in 150 for the cpu, be generous and give him 100 for the hard drives (more likely to be under 50), and 50 assorted for other stuff, and we get all the way up to 500 watts, some of which will be on the 5v and 3.3v rails. This is almost certainly more than his computer ordinarily draws even under heavy use, a figure likely to be under 400 watts. Conceivably he might approach 500 running specially designed software to max out all cores in his cpu and crunch the gpu and read/write to both ram and all three hdd’s simultaneously. But there’s no time under ordinary use that you get max draw from everything simultaneously.
Graphics card manufacturers have no idea what other stuff you might have in your computer, and have no idea how crappy your psu is, or how much less than its rated output it can actually deliver. And cheapass generic psu’s generally can’t deliver what they say they can. So they take a worst case scenario of you having 8 10k rpm terabyte hdd’s, 4 optical drives, etc, etc, and then take the total wattage they think you might need with that configuration and add 50% or so to account for underperforming psu’s, and give you that number as a minimum requirement for a power supply.
Without going to multiple graphics cards, cpus, or massive RAIDs, I don’t think it’s possible to even approach the capacity of an 850 watt psu.
Well, I haven’t measured it myself, but the GTX 295 is a dual-GPU configuration and those typically have a very high peak power load so I’m not sure 200W will be enough, it might fall closer to 300W. Either way, a cheaply made 850W power supply might not be able to sustain much more than 500W on the 12V rail to begin with, and subpar cooling would make it even more likely to fail under high loads.
xbitlabs actually has a very nice article on power consumption: link
With fancy metering equipment they measure actual power consumption and never manage to get past 500 watts, and that under unrealistic load conditions, i.e. benchmark software that loads processors beyond what any actual game could.
Moreover, the OP seems to be having these issues crop up even when the computer is idle (“I came home and found…”). At idle the thing is probably pulling well under 200 watts.
I’m going to guess that the OP’s actual problem is motherboard-based, possibly inadequate cooling of some of the various power regulation doodads next to the cpu which he’s probably cooling with a tower heatsink that blows sideways instead of down onto the board.
A friend at work (who builds PCs) used a different test (with more options) He went overboard in some of the estimations (for example, I have two 500gb drives and a 1tb drive. so he chose 4 500gb drives) and it came out around 450watts.
Well, whether it was done intentionally or not, your BIOS is giving an overclocking failed message, which means that some of the settings are not correct, which is most likely the source of your hardware failures. You might want to reset it to the original settings (just be sure you know what you’re doing, or have somebody who does help, since resetting the bios means that everything else will have to be customized again)
Holy crap. I apologize for the thread derailment (although not that much since I’m still doing it) and until the OP troubleshoots a little more it’s impossible to help him out. However I’d really like to reply to this particular statement: fuckin’ totally, man. Honestly I have no idea why the majority of case fans are mounted parallel to all the components they want to cool.
I used to get a lot of ‘BIOS Overclocking Failed’ messages when I was overclocking my RAM. You said your 1066 mhz RAM was running at 800mhz… Did you set it to that or was it that by default? If it’s wrong by default then the timings/voltage might be set wrong too. There should be stickers on the RAM sticks, make sure the settings are identical in your BIOS, if only to rule that out as a possible problem.
Stuff like this is why I have my computers hung on the wall. Each hard drive has it’s own fan isolated with high tech rubber bands (snerk) and is setting on pads of rubber. They do not have to deal with any heat or outside induced vibrations during read/write. Components do not compound the heat problems for other components. Air flow is not a problem and they are not down in a hole collecting dust. Super easy to work on, spot fan problems or smoke real easy and it really does not look all that bad. All 3 of my desktops are like this…
