Heat or Power or both?

S

Slow Cheetah

n00b
Joined
Aug 3, 2004
Messages
14
The last couple months I've been having some periodic lockups and system crashes. I suspect it might be a heat issue since it really only started to happen when the full heat of summer hit. I was also thinking there could be a power issue since I ended up putting more into this system than I originally planned.

A64 3500+ 90nm
1 gig corsair value
GeForce 6600Gt
SB Audigy 2ZS
WD Raptor HDD
Maxtor 300gb HDD
Maxtor 250gb HDD x2
Antec Sonata w/ included 380w PS

I have two questions:
1) Do you think heat is the culprit of my system instability? (All coolings is at stock, but I'm not OCing.) That Raptor seems to get pretty hot.

2) Do I have enough power to upgrade the video card to something in the 6800 range with all those HDDs? The 6600gt might be working to hard to fill my shiny new Dell 24" LCD at 1900x1200.

Thanks for your input.
 
First I would check the event logs on the computer to see if anything has been captured there.

Then I would open my case and give it a good dusting and then verify all my fans were spinning and then test to see if removing the fur coat from the inside of my PC fixed it.

Then I would unplug any unnecesary hardware (optical drive, non-critical USB devices, secondary HD, etc) and see if reducing the load on the PS fixed it.

If any of those things work, you have found your issue. If not, post back here and we'll see what we can do to help you out.
 
Slow Cheetah said:
The last couple months I've been having some periodic lockups and system crashes. I suspect it might be a heat issue since it really only started to happen when the full heat of summer hit. I was also thinking there could be a power issue since I ended up putting more into this system than I originally planned.

A64 3500+ 90nm
1 gig corsair value
GeForce 6600Gt
SB Audigy 2ZS
WD Raptor HDD
Maxtor 300gb HDD
Maxtor 250gb HDD x2
Antec Sonata w/ included 380w PS

I have two questions:
1) Do you think heat is the culprit of my system instability? (All coolings is at stock, but I'm not OCing.) That Raptor seems to get pretty hot.

2) Do I have enough power to upgrade the video card to something in the 6800 range with all those HDDs? The 6600gt might be working to hard to fill my shiny new Dell 24" LCD at 1900x1200.

Thanks for your input.
Click to expand...

Check your mobo bios Hardware monitor for system temps after an hour of idling, or motherboard monitor while your pc is in used. anything under 50ºC is fine, and probably less than 60ºC while gaming will act normal. As far as power, you can use something like Sisoftware sandra lite 2005 (environmental Monitor) to see how much your 12v power rail fluctuates while gaming. Or look on your motherboard for popped capacitors(they have a brown gel on the top of them) which means you need a stronger psu (and a new mobo if you have popped capacitors)
 
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