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Old 11-27-2011, 08:51 PM   #1
dannybeckett
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New watercooled rig, instabilities all over the place

I recently came into some good luck and I decided to buy myself a new PC. i7 2600k, GTX 560Ti, 8 GB Corsair Vengeance 1866, OCZ Vertex 3, blah blah. Got it up and running but it was crashing all over the place, and I couldn't run the RAM at 1866 MHz. Testing revealed a dodgy stick of RAM :@

Anyway I've requested a new set from scan.co.uk so hopefully this swap will happen quickly. So there I was with 1 good stick of RAM, stress testing at ~4.8 GHz - when my PC crashed. I assumed the OC was too agrressive for the given voltages so I backed it off a bit. Tried to boot into windows but it kept hanging before I hot the login screen. I was slightly concerned but I thought, oh well the windows installation has corrupted. So I try to repair it, I've found W7 is quite good at sorting itself out. I attempted repairs but hanging occured before it did anything useful. A little more worried now I thought, hmm, perhaps the installation had gotten so corrupt it cant repair itself. So I grab the windows dvd and attempt a restore booted from the CD. The repairs failed again. I'm like... wtf is going on now... have I borked my CPU after having it for only a week? So I try a full on format/fresh install of windows... I'm really hoping this is going to work now. Installs alright, reboots and gets to 'configuring registry' splash screen and hangs again. I'm now in full panic mode thinking to myself I've busted my brand new computer! I assumed that i damaged some part of the processor, an area which only gets accessed by higher level programming calls or something simalar. Is this kind of damage even possible? Thinking about it now, I don't think it is, but at the time I thought it a possibility.

Anyway I have a search on the internet (...using my phone) to see if other people have had this kind of problem. A guy said he had something simalar and it came down to his power supply being faulty. I thought it was a long shot but a shot nonetheless. I had an old Tagan 480W supply in my room so I hooked it up and bingo, no issues at all! I was very shocked/relieved at the thing not hanging at all. I test the theory out by installing my other power supply back, but it worked again... I then put the problems down to a misconnection from the power supply to the motherboard and swapping it in and oput resolved the issue. 20 mins later and another hang; no, the power supply is definitely on its way out. I'm now using the Tagan supply which is making the most horrific hissing you have ever heard an SMPS make. I have a new Silverstone 700W supply in the post as I type which should be here on Tuesday.

Just thought I'd share this little episode with everyone, and ask whether anyone else has had power supply issues like this? The blackberry phone is about as useful as religion at taking pictures, but I have included some anyway (please note, the radiator shroud is getting sprayed black soon, and the picture of my finger is when I got a little cavalier with the angle gridner whilst making the shroud, thought the wound was quite... interesting):

http://imgur.com/a/GjvaU#0

Additional Comment:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/700w-...iet-fan-atx-v2

Thats the new PS btw

Last edited by dannybeckett : 11-27-2011 at 08:51 PM. Reason: Automerged Doublepost
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Old 11-28-2011, 06:32 PM   #2
Jahova
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I have seen Power Source issues like that. Turns out the power strip was plugged into a 3-prong Y splitter that had an old florescent light connected. Using memtest I noticed the RAM was failing, and both sticks failed individually too.

Then it dawned on me... what if the memory voltage is not stable and causing this random behavior. I bumped the memory voltage up and the problem went away. However, the memory shouldn't need more power when it is running at stock, so I set it back down to stock voltage and tried again, just to fail again.

Then I turned off that fluorescent and tried it and the problem disappeared. Testing and re-testing with the old fluorescent light turned off succeeded every time. So the problem was not the RAM or the PSU, but the cleanliness of the power it was receiving.
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Old 11-28-2011, 09:22 PM   #3
dannybeckett
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I'm an electronic engineer so that phenomena has piqued my interest. Congrats on the deduction! Was the power supply you were using a good quality unit? Good power supplies should be able to filter out mains noise, but some wont be designed well enough to deal with the garbage old flourescent lights can put on a line. And even good ones go bad eventually - both my OCZ SilentXStream 600W & Tagan TG480 are bust; not only does the Tagan make horrible noises, when under high load it starts emitting that 'overheating component' smell AND i'ts 12V line drops to 11V(!!!). The ATX Spec allows for 5% deviation in rail voltage, which means a lower limit of 11.4V. It no longer meets ATX Spec. A rather worrying state of affairs. To be fair to the thing though, it hasn't dropped voltage to the point where my PC crashes on boot which is what I suspect the OCZ is doing, and it sounds and smells like it is having a MUCH harder time...

I'm going to try my potentially dodgy stick of RAM again tomorrow when the new power supply comes. My circumstances are not the same as yours so I dont think it's going to work, but after what you experienced I think it's worth a shot eh!

(P.S. I think this thread should be moved to the power supply section)

Last edited by dannybeckett : 11-28-2011 at 09:31 PM.
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Old 11-29-2011, 05:09 PM   #4
Jahova
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It was a Corsair TX750, the black one with orange trim. Probably one of the best PSU's ever made for overall quality, so the problem was unexpected to me.



I built 3 identica workstations like this for boss-man, a co-worker, and myself. Core i7-2600, 8Gb Mushkin memory, Asus P67-pro motherboards, Nvidia GT240 video card, twin 1Tb WD Blue drives in RAID1, some other odds and ends. There was no way this rig could ever utilize the true 750 watts. The Corsair TX750 was overkill, but reliability was its primary purpose, and the possibility of upgrading things in the future.

It was a pretty enlightening experience, and I actually RMA'd the memory before continuing with the actions I posted above. The replacement memory did not solve the problem, and somehow it worked out to be that stupid old fluorescent light on a boom stand. I have another identical fluorescent light here next to my main rig, but this rig is on an APC UPS.

The fluorescent lights were old lights from an engineering and drafting firm. These 'high tech lights' were used before the days of AutoCAD. They are convenient and reliable if you can tolerate the buzzing noise it makes with both light tubes installed. Similar to this image:

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