I recently upgraded and got a case from a local store. I didn't change out the power supply at the time b/c money was a little tight. I upgraded to an AMD 64bit 3200+, MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum mobo, two 512mb sticks of ddr400, and a 120gb sata drive. I still have my GeForce 4 Ti-4600 video card and my SB Audigy 2 sound card. Other periphereals include a dvd-rom and a cd-rw burner and a spare 80gig ata133 drive. Here's my issue. Lately I've had a couple of sudden reboots with no error screens or anything. The computer screen would go blank and the computer would reboot. Also lately, my sound will randomly go in-and-out volume wise; like if some outside party had a volume knob for my computer. This happens during light and heavy work such as webbrowsing or playing games like World of WarCraft/CounterStrike/etc. Is this most likely a PSU problem? If so, what would you all recommend for my system?
What's the voltage of your power supply, it seems like some of your hardware takes up a lot of power. I don't know for sure but that Audigy card you have seems like it takes up a lot of power.
it could be a psu problem, but it could possibly be that somthing is overheating, as i have a simaler problem were my computer suddenly reboots or powers off, and i replaced the power supply with a £73 power supply and it did not solve my problem, have you got stock cooling on cpu, have you overclocked anything? what power supply do you have?
Stock psu's will not uncommonly do this. Though it could also be you're motherboard, MSI has been under fire for sometime now over stability issues.
The power supply came w/ the case so it's very generic with 450watts. I purchased an Enermax Noisetaker 420w a couple days ago and it should be in wednesday. I know it has less wattage but wattage shouldn't be a main concern when buying a power supply since that's only a max rating at optimum surroundings. I have stock cooloing on the cpu, no overclocking of anything.
Sounds good, stock cooling will be fine, in some cases you can squeeze a bit of ocing out of stock anyway.
check out your needed PSU wattage here http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/ and look at this for details on PSU's http://www.hardwareforums.com/showthread.php?t=5218
While that Enermax PSU is a little lower than what you'd probably want, I'm almost positive it's a more accurate rating than that 450W one that came with the case. Additionally, Enermax is pretty conservative on their ratings.
Yeah, I might have gotten the 470w Enermax noisetaker but the price jump was a little bit more than what I wanted to spend. I did that cpu wattage calculator that Mat555 posted. Ended up around 370watts I think, so not too bad for a rough estimate. The new PSU is running very well. So far no crashes, no glitches, sound is stable. Thanks all for your help and input. =)
Yea, sudden crashes like that are almost always PSU related. Heat is rarely an issue when you have stock cooling, thats why it is stock, its good enough to run but not superb. Anyways, 420 watts should be plenty of power now and into the near future (1-2 years), assuming you upgrade in that time period. Good news is that computer parts companies realized that using infinite amounts of power was not a good idea so they have started to lessen power requirements on new components. Such as the 7800 GTX only needing as much power as a 6800 Ultra.
