So, one late night of gaming, my power supply (500w, came with the case) went "bang.....bang bang" and everything powered down. I almost immediately knew it was the PSU, so I ripped it out and looked in the guts. Sure enough, there was a couple wires where the insulation had burned off and one of the components on the board (not sure what it's called) looked pretty melty. I put in a replacement power supply, which was 520 watts. Upon firing up the system everything seemed fine--but whenever I would try to start a game it would give me a 'blue screen of death' and restart. I downloaded CPUID HWMonitor to check the voltages to the components, and I noticed that the 12v rail was running at only 4v (or so it said) and the 5v rail was showing about 3v. The graphics card was not getting hardly any power as well. With the help of a buddy, I discovered that my "cheapo" power supply from Best Buy did not have sufficient amperage on the rails to run the Nvidia GTX 460 that I have, so I assumed this was causing the crashes upon starting games. It also went 'blue screen' afer just leaving the PC idle for about 45 minutes. So I decided to bring in the big guns and ordered a 750 watts PSU, with lots of amps on the rails--I wanted to be sure my components were getting enough amperage. My video card now shows plenty of power supplied to it , which is good news. However, the 12v rail is still showing only 4v and the 5v rail is still only showing 3v. I did still get a 'blue screen' from idling the computer despite the fact that the video card is well-powered. Did I fry my motherboard? Does anyone have any suggestions or other tests I can run? Thanks in advance! EDIT: I didn't think of checking the voltages in the BIOS until now...I did and the voltage for the 12v rail is reading 11.8 and the 5v rail is spot on. The monitoring software must be faulty. But now the question is, why do I get blue screens if the voltages are good after swapping out the power supply? EDIT: 2 of the BSOD messages I get are: DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGE_AREA The 2nd of the two messages happened within moments of the OS booting several times in a row.
First of all, I hope you are not buying cheap power supply's and ex-speck it not to crash.. You have to buy a Brand name like Corsair/Antic/OCZ, And must be at least 80% rating... Did you pull out the bio's battery to reset your bio's after the power supply blew up ?
Unless you're measuring straight at the voltage, you won't get an accurate reading. Software monitoring isn't that accurate because it's not measuring at the power supply. Also, when a power supply blows up, you run the risk of it taking something else with it. It happened to me with an Enermax unit, so a bad-brand PSU isn't necessarily the cause. However, it's always better to invest in a quality unit. Not to scare you, but if something else fails, don't be surprised. I lost an awesome motherboard that time because the surge fried something within the PCB. You fell for the ruse in the PSU/Case combo. Pardon my French, but those PSU's are always, every single time, utter shit. A good low-end 400-500W PSU seems to start at around $70-80 USD, which is what you unfortunately see the PSU/Case combos run. If you're in doubt, physically lift up the PSU, the heavier it is, the more likely chance is that it will be a better unit. Of course, there are sites that review power supplies: [H]ard|OCP, PC Perspective, JohnnyGURU, Hardware Secrets...to name a few. There are other sites that "review" the power supply, but they usually resort to "it looks nice" and "it didn't die when we powered up". Lots of things turn on fine, but that doesn't mean they're good. Never skimp on the power supply. Get a slower CPU or a little less RAM, but never cut out on the power supply.
