Athlon 64 blew my 350W PSU!

TD22057 · Post by **TD22057** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 7:40 pm

Thought I'd relate my latest computer upgrade experience. My old system:

Athlon XP 1800+
256M RAM
Seagate Barracuda IV 80 gig
CDROM RW
350W Enermax PSU
Geforce 2GTS GPU

I just upgraded to:
Athlon 64 3000
MSI K8T NEO-FSR main board
512M RAM

After the install, I everything started up fine but I was getting random crashes, Windows warnings about removing my CD drive (it's an IDE drive), and random noise on the display. I wasn't sure what was going on.

A lot of people on the AMD forums say things like "you need at least 30A on the 12V line" (substitute your own number here) without any evidence that I could find. I did my own computations and thought I might need 12A on the 12V line if everything was running full blast at the same time.

The Enermax PSU I was using was pretty old, but it was a good PSU when I bought it. 350W, 17A on the 12V line. It's suffered 2 fan failures over the years (and shut itself down each time). I tried everything I could think of until I tried to flash the BIOS and the board died on me. Luckily I was able to RMA the board. While I was waiting, I put my old system back together and the fans spun up but the HD didn't start and the it wouldn't boot.

I figured I was due for a new PSU anyway so I bought a Nexus NX-4090 (400W with 2 12V rails). Put that in my old system and everything worked fine. When the new board came, everything worked perfectly.

I can't come up with any reason why my old PSU would have been insufficient, but it was. I haven't had time to try and figure out what happened to it either. I'm not going to claim that 17A on the 12V line shouldn't be enough to run this chip, but in my case (old PSU), it clearly wasn't. I looked for a 300-350W PSU that might cut it but, in the end, I decided to be safe and get more than enough. I'm pretty happy with the NX4090 - it's very quiet and with my setup, I really liked the bottom mounted fan.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Thu Sep 16, 2004 8:36 pm

As MikeC has said in the past. PSU components DO age. They won't always last forever.

hvengel · Post by **hvengel** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 2:23 pm

Also you had 2 fan failures which got the PSU hot enough to shutdown. So this could have made it weaker still.

Post by **MikeC** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:13 pm

Funny, just today, a friend of Richard, SPCR's web tech guru, had an Enermax PSU problem with a new A64 cpu/board. His Enermax was an old one, too, rated at 300W. It ran all night but refused to start this morn. Probaby the extra startup current is too much for it, or maybe last night was enough to take critical components to below the current needed to start his new cpi/board.

acaurora · Post by **acaurora** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:36 pm

sthayashi wrote:As MikeC has said in the past. PSU components DO age. They won't always last forever.

Neither do diamonds *plays the DeBeers commercial*

oh <censored>, forgot to ship the NX-4090 to Mike! Ahhh *hauls ass to the post office*

DryFire · Post by **DryFire** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:41 pm

That's odd. I'm running a 300W fortron, w/ my A64 setup no problems yet.

I hope mine doesn't die on me.

I think if i add anything else I'll def. have to upgrade.

sthayashi · Post by **sthayashi** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:50 pm

acaurora wrote:Neither do diamonds *plays the DeBeers commercial*

You're quite right on that

acaurora · Post by **acaurora** » Fri Sep 17, 2004 3:54 pm

There's a band that actually created a song based upon the DeBeers commercial. Either that, or based it off the same tune that DeBeers used to make their commercial - Bond - Victory. They also have a song, "Viva!", which is basically an upbeat version of Victory

.

*Resumes listening to Enya - Only Time Pop Remix*