Random Power loss

[tpicciani]

I've suddenly started having random shutdowns of my system. I get no warnings, no errors, and it has happened before windows has come up and after several minutes of uptime. I'm guessing power supply.

PC was built around 11/25/04 using the following:

Thermaltake SilentPower 560 watt PS
Epox motherboard 9nda3+ (For Athlon 939 pin cpu)
Athlon 64 3500+
1 gig PDP DDRAM PC 3200 2 x 512 meg
MSI GeForce 4600 video card
SB Live

All equipment is power protected via a APC RS1500 UPS.
Running WinXP with SP2

PC is kept very clean. Running Avast and Kerio firewall.

Everything ran fine for 6 weeks till around 1/15/05. No issues at all. Then I started getting ramdom shutdowns. Seems to be happening a couple times a day now.

After loss of power power button press will only turn on green light on pc but no fans and no power starts up. Have to power off cpu from UPS or back of pc to get it to work. On rare occastion power button will start pc up.

Corrective action taken:

Scanned for viruses with boottime scan from Avast.
Checked case for shorts.
Ran spyware checkers - Ad_aware, Spybot, and Spysweeper.
Updated bios on motherboard to latest version.

PC shut down 3 times today after all of this.

I've put a similar query to Thermaltake. I think I need a replacement and I can't send the ps back to Newegg because I lost the box. I kept it for 4 weeks figuring that if it goes that long it should be fine. Huh!
Any thoughts?

Tom P.

[beavo451]

Re: Random Power loss

The only time I had that problem was when my CPU was overheating. Other than that, I don't know.

[Thoric]

Re: Random Power loss

sounds like your Power Supply is struggling to power your system. although 560w should be able to handle it. check all ure connections is all i can suggest...

CPU heat-related shutdowns i think causes BSODs and restarts, not total power outage....

[Spongebob]

Re: Random Power loss

Are you runnig any programs or is something running in the backgroud when the shutdowns happen? Did you make any recent changes, settings, drivers, ect?

[metallicat666]

Re: Random Power loss

sounds like something might be short circuiting.
have you moved the computer recently

[Brennan]

Too much power??

Im guessing your power supply is way larger then your computer actually needs and its causing your system to overheat.

[Amd_Lover2004]

Re: Too much power??

Im guessing your power supply is way larger then your computer actually needs and its causing your system to overheat.

Unlikely, the CPU only takes what it needs to operate, Now if a circuit on the CPU was screwed up(or motherboad) then THAT could cause to much power to be sent to to the processor.

See if shutting down certain programs stops the problem. if not you may need to try taking it(power supply) back or sending it back to Newegg or whoever you got it from and get a replacement. if that doesnt work then something may be ****ed up. But check it out.

[tpicciani]

Re: Random Power loss

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Yesterday I took the UPS out of the equation and plugged the computer directly into the wall. It ran fine for 8 hours. I shut down and went to bed. This morning it would not power up at 6:30 a.m. Got some breakfast, went down 15 minutes later and it booted fine. I left it running while I'm in work. I'll find out in an hour whether it is still running.

Gotta be ps.

Problem: I threw out the box since it was working for 2 months without issues! I have to deal with the mfg.

I'm decided to send an rma to Thermaltake. No response yet but I'm sure they will take care of things. On the other hand I'm not wondering if it will fail in 2 months. I thought Thermaltake was solid.

Tom P.

[tpicciani]

Re: Random Power loss

Update:

Got home and the pc was still powered. Shut it down and rebooted. No issues.
Got an RMA from Thermaltake but it will take a couple business days out and 5 days back. If I want to stay up I'd need a replacement ps. So I went to zipzoomfly and ordered a Enermax Noisetaker 470 for $75. I figure sooner or later a ps will blow somewhere and I'll have a spare. Once I put that in I'll send out the Thermaltake ps for RMA replacement.

I neglected to mention I was having issues with my UPS, an APC RS-1500. It's been flipping to battery for 5 seconds and coming back. Never lost power during those incidents. Got a response from APC on my RS1500. They had me reduce the hardware sensitivity.

I tried to think of anything I did 2-3 weeks ago that changed things around that could cause these problems. Now I remember that I did replace the D drive with a 200 gig unit and I did a bios update. After checking the settings I decided to set bios to failsafe and manually alter the settings needed such as disabling sound, enabling raid, etc.

Also I rebuilt the mirrored raid.

I'm still running. I'm going to extensively test the system over the next few days and we'll see.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

Tom P.