Has my PSU died after overclock?

[metaljesus]

UPDATE: Has my PSU died after overclock? - Follow up MOBO question

Update: It was the motherboard, please see follow up question in new post below.

Hi all. I'm a newb on here and am only posting at a last resort. I'm a regular on other forums and hate newbies posting new threads about things covered in stickies or that have already been discussed over and over - so I've done a lot of reading and searching and cant find anything already in the forum to help.

As a refference to my level of knowledge: I have some expereince in basic system building but new to overclocking and modding.

Here's the situation. I build my new system about 3 weeks ago and have been using it for work (mainly cinema4d and after effects) and gaming ever since. Its been running great. I'd always intended to overclock it but was too busy with work untill now to take the time. I've been following Miahallen's awesome 3 step guide and everything was going well. I'd figured out my limit (settings below) and had run Prime95 for 10 minutes with full load temps maxing at 90C, and was about to leave Prime95 for a few hours to confirm it was stable. I'd just finished running Cinebench to do a comparison between my pre-overclock score and the current setting's score. I opened up Firefox and was checking my email when the computer shut down. This happened when the CPU was at maybe 5% load. Now it wont power back on at all. When I press the power button the fan powers on for a fraction of a second and then stops (it turns maybe one rotation) and the graphics card does the same. The PSU makes a clicking sound. And that's it.

I've tried re-setting the cmos, removing the battery, re-seated the graphics card and all the ram, tried using just one stick of ram, tried different ram sticks in postition 1, removed the hard drives and optical drives, tried different power outlets in my house - nothing has helped! I'm at a bit of a loss as to whats happened. It seems like my PSU has died but im not sure why overclocking would have caused that? As I say, the system has been running fine for a few weeks now.

Any advise or help would be extremely appreciated. Here was me thinking i was going to get into water cooling and modding and now im stuck on a problem like this.

If there is any more information that I should provide – please let me know!

Heres my specs:

Barebones base: Shuttle XPC SX58J3 (specs here)

Motherboard: Shuttle FX58V2 (Chipset: Intel X58 Express)
PSU: Shuttle 500 Watt mini PSU
CPU: Intel i7-960
Ram: Gskill ripjaws – 12GB (4gb x3) F3-12800CL9T-12GBRL
(specs here)
Hard drive: WD Caviar Black 1 TB
Graphics: XFX ATI Radeon HD5770 1GB

Overclock I was running:

cpu clock ratio: 24
bclk: 150
dram ratio: 3
cpu vtt +3
ioh 1.3V

As I say, any help is really appreciated!

-Anthony.

 

[GT3mich]

Try clearing the Cmos chip and see if that gets to run.

 

[EarthDog]

He did....

Sounds like a bad PSU to me. I doubt its b/c of the overclocking though. It may have pushed it over the edge for somethign already bad. 500W though is PLENTY for that system.

 

[Marshmallow64]

Sounds like a bad psu to me as well. Since you have a shuttle, I am actually not familiar with any good mini psus.

 

[metaljesus]

Okay well its good to know im probably on the right track and theres not something simple I missing. Well, acutally I guess that would have been better but alteast im not going crazy.

Wonder if a warrenty claim will be do-able...

 

[metaljesus]

Hi all, thanks for the help earlier.

I had the barebones repaired under warrenty and just recieved it back today.

On the work sheet it says:
1. Tested PSU, passed.
2. Installed hardware, turned on.
3. Shorted PSU, replaced motherboard.
4. Updated BIOS.
5. Ran PCCHECK, passed.
6. Installed Windows 7.
7. Passed all tests in operating system.
8. Repaired.

So, the way I'm reading this was that the PSU had shorted and killed the motherboard. Is this something that probably happened because the PSU was drawing more power than pre-overclock and was an existing problem? Ie a problem with the PSU that was revealed by the overclock, but the overclock wasnt the acutal cause? Or could it be that the overclock directly caused the motherboard to fail?

I'm just looking for any advice before I go back to trying again.

 

[trents]

Man you were running a lot of juice sucking hardware for a 500 watt (mini Suttle) PSU. I think you ought to look at upgading the PSU. For future reference, here's a simple way to check a PSU: Unplug the 24 pin and the 4/8 pin power connectors from the motherboard and all other connectors to hardware devices. Plug in a fan on one of the 12v molex connectors, not on a motherboard header. Take a paper clip and short across any green and any black wire pins on the 24 pin connector. Switch on the psu. If the fan spins for a bit and then dies you have a bad PSU. As soon as the capacitors drain off the PSU isn't able to recharge them.