12v and 5v reading too high?

[charloscarlies]

Well a week or two ago we were hit with a pretty bad lighting storm...and like the idiot I am I had one of those s#!tty power strips that do practically nothing for surges.

Anyways...our power cycled on and off a few times while my rig was running. After the power came back on I tried to boot it up, and when I got into Windows I immediately got a BSOD error. First instinct was that my memory or board got fv#@ked during the storm. I went to sleep figuring I would deal with it in the morning. The next day it booted into Windows fine...and ran for about 5-10 minutes before restarting without any errors. I couldn't reproduce a BSOD errors after that...but it seemed to run up to a couple hours before randomly rebooting.

In my disgruntled state...I ripped the machine apart because I needed a PSU for one of my new rigs:

Opteron 146
Asrock Dual
Enermax 460
2 GB of that Gskill Value stuff that's supposed to overclock decently

Did a fresh install and everything seemed to be working fine until yesterday when it randomly just restarted again. I checked temps, vcore, mem voltage, and loosened timings just to rule that out. Everything looked fine...and I'm going to run memtest when I get some time...but what I noticed was the 12V and 5V rails are reading a little high (12.52 and 5.25 respectively). The 3.3 rail looks ok...and I don't see many fluctuations under load but those seem a bit off. Could the storm have caused these instabilities? Is it hurting anything running over spec even if it's just a little bit?

My next option is a new PSU...but if there's something else I can try that would be great.

 

[Jiggz]

Obviously the easiest way to find out what the problem is to substitute a well known working PSU. The 12V rail looks a little high but not that high it will start shutting down and rebooting. But the 5V rail is way to high, high enough to trigger over voltage protection on the PSU.

 

[Unkno]

hmmm, here's a bump, also i was wondering if the 12V line at 11.46V during load is ok

 

[John]

Use a voltmeter to test the rails and do not rely on sftware readings. The rails should be within 5% (+12v, 5v, 3.3v) of their default values.

 

[charloscarlies]

I know that's the next thing I need to get around to. But just for fun...if it turns out the 5V reading is correct...would that cause restarts like I'm getting?

 

[Unkno]

i'm guessing you have more than one rig.....maybe try the psu from a rig that is working on your the one that is BSODing

 

[lenjack]

Your readings are within the accepted limits. Doublecheck with a meter.

 

[Jiggz]

Originally posted by: Unkno
hmmm, here's a bump, also i was wondering if the 12V line at 11.46V during load is ok

Generally, the rule of thumb for percentage of voltage regulation is 5%. So 5% of 12V is 0.6V which means the min & max acceptable voltage is 11.4~12.6V. So 11.46V is considered OK. Again, this is a general rule of thumb. Check your PSU specs to know your % of voltage regulation it should fall between 3%~7%.

Of course, the only true way to find out the voltage rails is by using a voltmeter or multimeter.