PSU advice

[Loosecannon]

I thought i'd share the inccident that happened this past weekend involving an OCX Gamestream 650w PSU.

System Specs -
Intel X6800
Asus P5K Premium
Leadtek 6800GTX
2gb OCZ Spec Ops 900mhz
OCZ Gamestream 650w

The problem came to light about a week ago when my wife complained of random shutdowns while surfing the web or checking email,nothing to strenuous,it became more frequent as time passed.
So naturally i was called upon (the first time i was asked of course) to fix the problem. I tried various conditions to try to recreate the issue including surfing,email etc etc and to no avail,I was about to put the problem down to "USER ISSUES" when i decided to run Crysis at max settings to really work the system. " HOW IS YOU PLAYING GAMES ALL NIGHT FIXING MY PROBLEM!?" is basically how the one sided conversation went....anyways still no issue.
Then as the system was idling it happened, restart- no errors , no issues prior to it happening and definately seemed to be a hardware issue. Suspecting memory i ran memtest four separate times with varying results of two fails and two passes.
This imediatley pointed me toward a voltage issue,at the same time i noticed the NEC DVD had stopped responding and was now a brick. Disconnecting the mainboard Molex i proceeded to test output voltages from the PSU

** NOTE Don't attempt to try this unless you know what your doing , ELECTRICITY KILLS COMPONENTS AND PEOPLE! **

Using a jumper wire i started the PSU and tested the 12v,5v and 3.3v lines with a multimeter (This method will only test what the PSU produces not what your components recieve) i missed the problem the first test i ran but the second time i noticed every 20-30 seconds the rails would spike and then drop as follows -
12v = 9.3v - 12.9v
5v = 4.5v - 5.3v
3.3v= 3.1 - 3.5v
Replacing the PSU has cured the restarts and luckily only cost me a DVD Burner. Never overlook your PSU it can be the casue of failures and is more often than not a problem with new builds not posting, even new PSU's are faulty out of the box sometimes.

[Yellowhello]

Glad you fixed it. What did you replace it with?

[Loosecannon]

Originally Posted by yellowhello

Glad you fixed it. What did you replace it with?

Its borrowing a TT Toughpower 650 unltil i get a chance buy one

[gvblake22]

WOW, those are supposed to be fairly reliable units! Thanks for the heads up LC. Are you going to try and RMA the unit back to OCZ?

[Reloadron]

Nice job of fault isolation with troubleshooting. Patience gets you there with an intermittent problem. Yeah, even the best of them hit a sour note sometimes.

I just looked and I have a 700 Watt OCZ Game Extreme sitting here as a spare.

Ron

[Loosecannon]

I'm not bashing OCZ , it just happened to be the unit that failed on me. Every manufacturer has had some bad units.