• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Is my power supply bad?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

i810 Forever

Member
Joined
Apr 6, 2002
Me and my friend recently built a new computer consisting of the following:

Abit BD7-II Motherboard
Intel Pentium 4 1.6A Retail w/ Retail HSF & Thermal pad
256MB stick of Corsair XMS3000 DDR SDRAM
ATI Radeon 8500 LE 128MB AGP
Toshiba CD-RW/DVD-ROM Combo drive
80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA hard drive
3.5" Sony Floppy
Creative Labs Soundblaster Live! 5.1 OEM PCI
Netgear 311 Ethernet PCI card

We have been experiencing lots and lots of random restarts, the system seems to work fine sometimes, and then at other times its barely usable (last night it restarted randomly, constant crashing also if we could even get far enough to the desktop. Today we were able to play some Quake3 and Medal of Honor for about 2 hours with no problems whatsoever. We left the computer on, went out for lunch, came back, and the machine generic 300W ATX power supply we are using. had crashed, displaying lines of colors all over the monitor! Right now we are typing this on that comp as it seems to be running ok (no random restarts or crashing.....yet).

Because of the restarts we are wondering if the problem is the
300W generic ATX power supply we are using. We went into the Abit BIOS to check the rails and we got this:

+3.3v was 3.23v
+5v was 4.94v
+12v was 11.79v

Are those readings ok, or do they indicate any power supply problems? Should be buy an Antec power supply locally and try that? Thank you very much in advance, we need to get this machine going ASAP because I will be going on vacation soon, and my friend needs something to keep him occupied. TIA
 
The numbers show a bit low......use a MBM5 to check them out under stress.....if they go lower than the psu is not good for yor system
 
Back