SPCR

I have an Enermax 350 watt power supply with the fans swapped out to a Vantec stealth 80 mm fan. The air exiting the power supply doesn't seem too warm, and the CPU is water cooled, so it sucks cool air into itself for cooling. I have problems booting the computer, so I normally leave it on 24/7. In order to boot the computer, I have to turn it on, and then everything hangs (The hard drive doesn't start spinning, and the light on the cd drive stays solid). In order to boot the computer, I have to unplug and then plug in the power line for the cd drive (weird huh?). When I'm in windows I get errors from monitoring software that say the 4.488 V power line is exceeding its tolerance. I haven't had any stability problems in windows (the power supply has been acting up like this for at least a month) until today. I left the computer on last night, and low and behold, it was turned off this morning (no one could have turned it off). I booted, but a few times during the boot and windows startup it restarted (I fixed this problem by taking a cd out of the drive, it would reboot every time it spun up and started to read it)

Does anyone have any idea what I could do to fix this power supply, or should I live with its crazy personality and hope smoke doesn't come pouring out one day?

Its the AMD-problem, I can assume. Everything pulls from 5V line so that it drops while 12V rises. Not much to do but to buy a P4 or a better PSU. Well.. if you consider your system to be fairly low-consuming you might have a faulty PSU.

I dont think there is any 'burning' risk though. You'll only get stability problems when the CPU or something else doesent get enough juice at some instant.

I've never heard of this problem and ONLY build AMD systems.

I also have an Enermax 350 and don't have any issues (except that it's a bit louder than most quiet versions).

I'd try a different PSU.

What kind of MOBO you got?

I have a P4 that runs off the +5V rail, and I've seen AMD mobos that ran the CPU from the +12V.

Isn't it risky to plug in the power to the CD drive after the computer has been turned on? But if that's the only way to make the computer run, then the PSU is too weak. Does your water pump connect to it?

The pump is not plugged into the computer system, it's cord leaves the case and plugs into the wall. The line I have problems with is the 3.3 voltage line. right now it's hovering around 3. the 5 volt line is around 4.3 right now. I have an epox KT266A mobo, and I havn't had this problem in the 3 or 4 months I've been using it.

Maybe that particular Enermax 350W can't put out sufficient power for the +3.3V and +5.0V, but I'm guessing that its combined power rating is at least 180W, which should be enough for anything up to about XP2400+. Maybe one of the 100uF or larger, 6.3-25V capacitors on the output is bad

Droidkevin5 wrote:The line I have problems with is the 3.3 voltage line. right now it's hovering around 3. the 5 volt line is around 4.3 right now.

Either the thing reporting your voltages has gone nuts, or your psu is flaking. I would vote with larrymoencurly on this (cause he has kept me in line in a couple of forums ) but to be sure, try stick a multimeter in the 5V on a spare molex: anything below 4.75 at any time and I'ld swap (or fix) the psu.

POLIST8 wrote:I've never heard of this problem and ONLY build AMD systems.

I've had it. I've seen others that have it. Its more common on AMD. Havent seen one that actually got problems with it though. Its one thing to have unbalanced figures and another to have an unstable system.