More questions on PSU's

After reading the sticky, and other threads on PSU's, Ive decided to throw in my situation. MBM5 has been saying I have 11.61v, 4.08v, and 3.42v. I finally got curious and got out my fluke meter and checked. I got 5.16v at the 4 wire plug, and it didnt seem to vary with load much at all. Then the other wires came out to 12.11 with no load, and then when I ran sandra, it dropped to 11.88v. If I run pime95, it drops to 11.93v. Its a generic unit that came with the tower, a Power-Tek. Supposed to be 500w. What Im noticing is for instance, when I run prime95, if the system is cold, it will run some time before I get errors. The warmer it is when I try prime95, the quicker it trips a fault. With the readings I was getting on mbm, I thought it may be a power problem, but now Im not sure. It is a cheap psu Im sure. Its supposed specs are 38a for 5v, 17a for 12v, and 28a for 3.3v. Thoughts?

anybody?

generic power supplies suck..invest in a good one by fortron sparkle enermax antec zalman..its SUPPOSED to be 500..but ur no where near 500..invest in a good one..there are fortron's on www.newegg.com that are real cheap..and they usually give more voltage than they say..like a 350 gave over 400 watts...

Im curious if its related to the problems I encounter, when the system is loaded for a length of time. Should the 12v rail drop that much?

Hi greg.

Your PSU rails will fluctuate to a degree and from what you've stated everything seems to be normal so your error can't be traced to your PSU.

The trick is to test the PSU when you start to get errors (safely run the test leads out of you case so it can be tested with the case still closed) it could be the PSU, RAM, CPU, or motherboard. The only way to tell for sure is to test it but the problem is similar to a weak PSU spiking.