How to tell if powersupply is overloaded?

[prodigall]

I have a duron/abit kt7 raid system with 2 case fans, 1 drive, radeon. When the activity increases, the fans change speed ~150 and sometimes the supply itself gets warm to the touch. Im pretty sure this is not normal. My supply is 250w, 12v line is rated at 9 amps. Am I putting to much strain on it?

 

[Pabster]

Use something like MBM or Via HW to check your voltages. Monitor them, and if you're seeing major deviation on any of the voltage rails, it is overloaded. (i.e. the +5v going down to ~4v, etc.) A little variation isn't a big deal.

 

[V]

That happens to me too. Once there is cpu load, the +12v goes from 12.2v to 12.44v

 

[prodigall]

In MBM my 12v goes from 12.2 to 11.9 - is that a big fluctuation?

 

[bigdaddykane]

check the heat of the air that is leaving he powersupply. if it is hot then the ps is under some stress if not u should be ok.

 

[jcovercash]

My motherboard goes from 12.159 to like 5.14 for 3 seconds then goes back up, must be faulty monitering.

 

[mp3turbo]

hello,

probably faulty monitoring, system would not survive that drop. Anyway, here comes my HFP (hardware-fault-protection): have another power supply, cooler with fan, keyboard, mouse with pad, floppy, gfx (old 'cheapo one, pci is enough), power splitters handy, if you can, old monitor. That cost you ~80$ with monitor [even if you had to buy it, not to mention that every real comp'geek should have these grabbed of school, work, previous activities ] and in case anything goes wrong, you can restore your "operation" in 15 minutes. Many times I've got a lesson - friday evening or so, closed shops, nobody will deliver anything to me till Monday (in my country, I'm not in US), what will you do the whole weekend? Of course, you can have another MB+CPU handy, but that's another story we're not going to talk about...

bye, mp3turbo.

 

[ledzepp98]

i asked this question in the general hardware forum before i noticed this thread...since it is on topic i hope this double post is ok...anyway, how do these numbers look?