taking a vote on "why?"

[SuperT]

Hey All!
My sys specs are in my sig. but i have random shutdowns happening once or twice a day. I think i have it narrowed down to either power supply or my motherboard. Anyway, what do you think? I can be just watching TV on it or being idle whatever and it will shut down. temps are fine (44C cpu) and there is nothing happening in the event veiwer. I tried different RAM and knocked down the o/c to standard speeds. what am i missing?

 

[skace]

Did you make sure all your fans are spinning properly without being really weak or hesitating?

Along time ago I had a system that would always die randomly. It ended up being the fan on the PS was dying. It would spin up, but randomly just stop spinning, at which point the PS would hit its heat limit and forcefully shut off. Swapping out the PS fixed the problem.

 

[Supradude]

are you getting full-on shutdowns or restarts? cause i was getting random restarting a few days ago and after scandisk and defrag of both HD's the problem went away, seemed like a problem with a certain disk sector... maybe worth a try if nothing else seems to be working...

 

[SuperT]

thanks for the replies both of you! anyway, i get full on shutdowns, i do have my mobo set to restart after power failure, so it restarts. i run diskeeper 7 so all 4 drives are in great shape. any other ideas or is it looking more like the p/s?

 

[jmitchell]

sounds like it could be the power supply, however, keep in mind that even with sites like anandtech or tomshardware, they perform stability tests quite often when doing motherboard roundups/reviews. In many of these reviews, I have found that they are quite surprised to see a system that does not crash at least once in a 24 or 48 hour period, for inexplainable reasons. Not that they should, but they do...

 

[SuperT]

back to fan spinning issue, there were a couple of times that i could hear the 80mm fans (enermax) that are quite new going lub, lub, lub... when the system restarted, like they werent getting enough power to spin. what do you think?

 

[jmitchell]

try taking off the side/access panel of your case, so you can get a good visual of what the fans are actually doing. If they are obviously stuttering, fluttering, whatever, try this; disconnect the 80 and 90 mm fans from your mobo, and just aim a house fan at the open side of your case. This will keep you from having temp problems, and minimize a tiny bit of the voltage/amperage that is required of your mobo/ps. Also, is your system just sitting idle? Or do you have different services running? Ftp, IIS, scheduled maintenance (defrag, virus scan, etc). You can always test it in a bare minimum type environt, (i.e. disconnecting all totally unnecessary hardware, closing all unecessary tasks and processes) and see how it holds up then. There is obviously some reason why it is failing. If I had to pick between the ps and mobo my instinct would be ps, but thats probably just a biased opinion based on my personal experiences. Who knows, even a bad sector could kill it. (a fried ps even took out my cd-r, which was unfortunately touching the ps in my old tiny-a$$ case, and died of heat stroke)

 

[Bozo Galora]

you're overclocking. you need to bump voltage on CPU and dimm some more, or try dif ram brand

 

[Mem]

Try the CPU at default speed and see if you get the same problem,if you don`t then try what Bozo Galora suggested,on the otherhand if the problem remains at default speed I would try a different PSU,I did have random shutdowns happen to me once and it was in my case a faulty PSU.

 

[sandorski]

Check that the power cord is properly plugged in.