Power Supply Problem? Want to be sure.

[SpideyCU]

I'll try to make this as concise as possible, because I know people kind enough to stop in and read tech support threads don't like wading through a 10-page story of everything that's gone wrong (though I may not be able to avoid it). So, here it is.

Past few months one of my hard drives has been clicking, audiably sounding like it was powering down, then immediately spinning back up as if it was just turned on. I blamed the drive itself, and soon enough it had to be RMA'd because it died. New drive came back, same thing! Fast forward about a week, I got a DVD-RW drive and added it to my system - and now that hard drive refused to turn on at all. Moreover, while the lights on the DVD-RW drive indicated it was on, pressing the eject button would do nothing - when I forced the drive open (paperclip hole) and stuck a disc in, it tried to spin up, but couldn't read.

Curious, I unplugged several devices from my system - the DVD and CD-RW drives (yes, I had two other optical drives still in the rig), along with two intake fans, just to see what would happen. Lo and behold, the hard drive was no longer having issues, and the DVD-RW drive would do everything just fine.

Is my lackluster power supply the problem? It is by no means a brand name...it's a 500W POWMAX (Leadman). I realize this isn't a high-end PSU, but this wasn't intended to be a high-end rig...even though it eventually evolved that way. The lines didn't seem to be too bad, they were usually in the +/-5% range, but I don't know what other culprits to blame here.

Finally, in case it's deemed that I should really get a new power supply...how much to go for? I found a wattage estimator on some site that deemed my system components required at least 375W, but obviously I'd rather not lowball this. Currently this rig has...

AMD 2700+ Tbred
2x 512MB RAM
ATI 9800 Pro
SCSI Card w/ 15k RPM SCSI drive
2 IDE hard drives (soon to be SATA)
TV Tuner
DVD, CD-RW, DVD-RW drives
4 80mm fans
Graphic Equalizer (5.25" bay)

I realize the rig is rather bloated, but I'd like to keep everything here as-is. I'm a lazy SOB, and having 3 optical drives means fewer CD swaps. Is a quality, brand-name 450/470W enough? Or should I go for something like the Antec 550W to cover my hide?

Thanks for any and all suggestions here...I'd like to plug everything back in soon!

 

[Uncle Bob]

well my 2cents;

AFAIK, leadman is a mid-range manufacturer (i.e not cheap-n-nasty but decent quality) and 500w should be enough to power your rig with some spare capacity. Although to be sure you do need to look at the supply rating for each of the rails (12V, 5V, 3.3V) rather than just considering the overall wattage of the system. AMD do a wattage calculator sheet on their web site.

I'm suprised that just unplugging a couple of optical drives is enough to get reliable operation from the rest of the system as the majority of power is consumed by the cpu and graphics card. So you're either running at the absolute limit on one or more of the psu rails and a reduction of around 10-20w is enough to bring the system back to a stable condition OR something in your system is faulty and consuming much more power than it should.....

food for thought, hope this helps

 

[SpideyCU]

Thanks Bob. That's why I posted in the first place...it doesn't seem like the power supply itself is lacking, but it's just that I can't find any other reason for this to be happening. For the record, the rating on the current PSU are:

3.3V: 30A
5V: 50A
+12V: 25A
-5V: 0.3A
-12V: 0.8A
+5Vsb: 2.0A

These figures seem reasonable for a 500W supply. I suppose my immediate course of action over the next day will be to add components, one at a time, and try comparing the reported rail voltages. Thanks for the input, I appreciate it.

 

[rsc2573]

Just out of curiosity, those optical drives are not all IDE ?

I'll give you a few hints what you could check as well if you havent done it already.
- IDE hard discs shouldnt be mixed with optical drives on the same ide port, if you do you do not only get worse performance usually, but sometime strange behaviour with certain brands of DVD/CD-Roms.
- Don't put any other device on the same power cord your graphic card is on

Do you have energy management turned on in windows ?
Default for hard disc drives is about 20 minutes for powering down, i'd rather disable it.
Might be power management, not sure, as i have no english windows availble right now.

 

[SpideyCU]

All 3 optical drives are IDE. The drives are all separate - the three of them are on the mobo's PATA channels, the two IDE hard drives are connected to a RAID card running RAID-1.
The vid card cable is split from another device, and while I'll try connecting it directly to the PSU, I'm not sure how much of a difference it'll make.
Power management is disabled in Windows, I've never liked it.

Thanks for the suggestions, will tinker around.

 

[rsc2573]

The ATI Radeon 9800 Pro's are pretty power hungry, so might be a problem if other devices are attached to the same cord.
If you have some spare Y-cables to attach components on other cords I'd give it a try.

I thought at first about an IDE problem, with all that stuff in your box (cable length and quality might be an issue - had an MSI board once which wouldnt work with anything but the IDE cables MSI provided with the board) but that wouldnt explain the optical drive not even opening up.

 

[TheGreenGoblin]

Leadman might make decent psu's under their name but the POWMAX brand is crap. At my last job we had a cpl of Powmax's and they were complete junk.

 

[vertigo220]

Did you add anything new right before the problems started? It sounds like your system needs more current on the 12V rail (HDD's, ODD's, fans, and some video cards-though not the 9800-use 12V) than the power supply is willing to give out.