Failing Power Supply?

thczv · Post by **thczv** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 7:53 am

I am having trouble with a new build, and could use some advice. It is a Q6600 based system with 4 GB of ram. I salvaged some components from a couple of old systems, including a Seasonic power supply and a bunch of hard drives.

I put the system together with two HDs in a RAID 1 array, install windows, and everything is working fine. It is fast quiet and satisfying.

Then I add two additional HDs that I take out of my other PC. These HDs were working beautifully in my other PC up to the moment I took them out. But now that they are in my new PC, I have trouble. The new PC is very slow and almost (but not quite) non-responsive. AVG is running. But even when I shut it down, the PC is still slow. And my cpu utilization is very low (around 1%), and there is very little memory being used.

Is it possible that my power supply is failing, and that the problem only shows up when I try to access the HDs I just added (both of which are powered by Molex connectors on the same rail)?

Is there any way to troubleshoot that? Is it possible that uGuru would tell me?

Can you think of any other explanations for the slow down, given that CPU and memory aren't really being used much?

thczv

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 9:35 am

That doesnt sound anything like a PSU fault.

It could be a wiring/jumper/cable problem if any of the drives are PATA, those kind of weird slowdows (especially if its a jumpy kind of slow) are often hardware related, and as you just added 2 drives they/their configuration is suspect.

Try a couple of things, try the system without them, with just one of them, then just the other one having checked the jumpers and cable are sound.

Also try working in safe mode.

Andy

thczv · Post by **thczv** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 10:06 am

andyb wrote:That doesnt sound anything like a PSU fault.

It could be a wiring/jumper/cable problem if any of the drives are PATA, those kind of weird slowdows (especially if its a jumpy kind of slow) are often hardware related, and as you just added 2 drives they/their configuration is suspect.

Try a couple of things, try the system without them, with just one of them, then just the other one having checked the jumpers and cable are sound.

Also try working in safe mode.

I'll check on those things, thanks. Of the 2 newer drives, one is PATA and the other is SATA. The PATA drive is the only PATA drive I have in the system.

I have read about people having problems with AVG. Now I am wondering if AVG might really be my problem. Perhaps even when I think I have it shut down, it is still clogging things up.

soloman02 · Post by **soloman02** » Sun Jul 20, 2008 10:46 am

What is the wattage of the PSU? It sounds like the PSU may not have enough power. You said that when you added the two other HDDs you started experiencing slowdowns. It would be helpful if you can tell us everything in your PC, including fans. Also what is the wattage on the PSU. If you remove a HDD and the problems stop it could be that the PSU is not supplying enough power.