What is this PSU trying to tell me?

[Tad G]

My friend's Zalman ZM-400B-APS power supply has sent 2 "critical" messages to the Intel Active Monitor:

"A voltage (3.3V) has gone outside of its recommended range.
Bad voltage value 2.269 volts"

Then 1 second later:

"A voltage (3.3V) has returned to its recommended range."

This EXACT alert has happened on 2 separate occasions, almost 40 days apart.

What could be the problem ---in the PSU, or a component? Where to start looking?

What does the 3.3v rail power in a typical computer case?

Thanks.

[Jan Kivar]

I don't think that anything is wrong. It might be just a reading glitch from the monitoring chip. I'd start to worry if the alerts would happen many times in an hour.

Cheers,

Jan

[Rory B.]

I got a lot of those things from my Asus A7V266 where the Asus PC Probe software would show the 5v rail dropping to 0 for a few seconds every few days. I switched power supplies (from a noisy Enermax to a quiet Fortron) since then and the problem still happens, at about the same interval.

[Viperoni]

Never had that happen with my ZM400B-APS on an Epox 8rda3+.

[tof]

My friend's Zalman ZM-400B-APS power supply has sent 2 "critical" messages to the Intel Active Monitor:

"A voltage (3.3V) has gone outside of its recommended range.
Bad voltage value 2.269 volts"

Then 1 second later:

"A voltage (3.3V) has returned to its recommended range."

This EXACT alert has happened on 2 separate occasions, almost 40 days apart.

What could be the problem ---in the PSU, or a component? Where to start looking?

What does the 3.3v rail power in a typical computer case?

Thanks.

Reading your message, I got the impression that it's the PSU which sensed the failure and sent a "message" to the PC. I was not aware of any PSU having communication with the PC ???

So I assume that the sensing was performed by the monitoring chip on the MB. Which means you shouldn't be worried because glitches on these low cost monitoring chips are not rare (my Winbond monitoring chip does that from time to time)

[tof]

Even less worried considering the fact that the report of 2.2V is way off 3.3V... means it's a lot more likely to be a glitch than a line failure passing through 3.1v 2.9v 2.5v etc...