Weird voltage fluctuations...Help

I was having some problems with Vcore flucuations before and so i went out and bought the biggest best psu out there the Vantec 520 Stealth. Well that fixed my Vcore flucuations...kinda, and on my old psu my 5v was 4.92 and this one reads 4.7, i thought that was a little low but i also figured the psu needed to burn in, so i let it and now here we are 2 weeks later with this problem...

Today i stated re-overclocking my machine, bumping everythign back up, and now my 5v has returned to a nice 4.95 but it falls all the way to 4.7 ever few seconds or so then climbs back up...is this just some more of the burn in thing or what, i also thought it was weird that the line decided to jump from its 4.7 to 4.95 all in one day (today the day i stated upping voltages and overclocking)

My question is is this bad, should i be worried, maybe RMA the PSU, there are no other problems such as reboots being casued by it (as far as i can tell) any advise would be nice, system specs are in sig.

Edit 2: O yeah and it also did smell pretty strongly of burning, like that smell of hot electronics in my room for the first week or so that i had it, is that normal?

Edit 1: I am using a software program called 'asus probe' to check voltages



Thanks,

Matt


By the way, I am celebrating my first job, i am now working at Baskin Robins, so go buy some ice cream!!

Your first problem is checking voltages with anything other than a multimeter. If your computer is stable you're probably fine. I've heard other people say they can smell PSU's sometimes when new although I never had and I've had several new ones over the years. If you want to know for sure you can get a multimeter for 10 or 15 bucks and get a digital one. It's easy to check.

I would agree with the last post except that it's intermittant changes you are talking about. The voltage you read is only as accurate as the A>D converter on the mother board so as said before, absolute voltage should be monitored with a voltmeter. However, that being said this sounds like a capacitor problem when they begin to go bad they are temperature sensitive. They loose capacity as they warm up and gain it as they cool down or are just intermittant. The reason is with heat and time, seals being what they are, the water in the electrolyte evaporates and as the computer is being used the remaining moisture moves around inside the cap during use. I have seen ripple rise and fall in cycles like you describe with an oscilloscope. Since a DC voltmeter reads average voltage the more ripple present the lower the voltage, the worse the caps the more ripple.

Look for hot spots on your board, swollen capacitors, capacitors that have become so hot the vent marks, usually on the top or side, have split. Vent relief marks look like deep scratches on top usually looking like a cross "+" or a single mark lengthwise on the side of the cap sometimes completely under the plastic sleve on the cap. Look for brown, black or gray discoloration under the sleve indicating venting. Another dead giveaway is a dead fish odor, very distinctive and offensive. That odor is the odor of the electrolyte acting on the aluminum. You should also look around the base of the capacitors. I have had a Abit board for less than two years and already had four caps go bad in the power supply this way and two on the motherboard. The obvious symptom I saw was random freezes and reboots.

If you replace any caps use only 105 deg C. venting caps that is what a good motherboard should already have on it. If you can fit it sizewise get a cap with a few volts higher rating. The more current you are drawing the more heat will be produced both inside the caps and by other components. Caps produce heat too this is a little known fact but they do.