3ghz Power Consumption?

I figure this is a good place to get some input, so throw me your thoughts/knowledge, if you can.

I work in a company that is purchasing 3ghz Intel processors to upgrade our systems. I was putting in Antec TruePower 380's in there also, but we ran out. Our new shipment included cases with PowerMax 400w PSU's and we also got some of those by themselves (the PSU's).

Well, after deploying my first 3 systems, one of them started rebooting spontaneously, and so I disbled XP's reboot feature to try and get a better idea of the situation. It faithfully bluescreened an hour later and before I could get down there, it cut off. When I went to restart it, it wouldn't do anything at all. Upon testing it, the PSU was bad.

I was wondering right about then if we were going to have a problem with these PSU's, and so I decided to run my own little test. I loaded 3dMark on my PC (the new cases were nifty so I had to get one, and therefore had one such PSU), and ran it. It passed the video fine, and was on the second part of the CPU test when **POOF** it cut out. Once again, the PSU was dead.

My question is, do 3ghz processors have a special need above of the rest? Or is it strictly the cheap power supplies doing this?

I looked for info on this all day the other day and couldn't come up with any solid info.

Thanks for anything you guys can give me...

I switched it with one from a working PC and put the one from the working into it....the one that was working then stopped functioning...

Use something like MBM5 to monitor the voltages while running tests. You can get it to log them to a file, and see if any of the Voltage lines (12V, 5V, 3.3V) drop by much.

A cheap generic 380W PSU might be a little dodgy, but I would expect those antecs to be up to the task.

'Fortron' make excellent cheap powersupplies I believe, that function well beyond their rated specs.

What graphics cards do they have in them? High-end ones can consume a lot of power..(I'm assuming these aren't though?)

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Thanks for the posts, I appreciate it.

Yea, I'm pretty sure that it's the PSU's fault (they are PowMax and also PowerTek) because they are extremely light (which to me would indicate there isn't that much in terms of heat dispersal in there).

I just didn't know if there was some type of power rating I should be looking for somewhere that might be listed...I'm guessing that the secondary channel on 3ghz processors probably gets hogged a bit more and that's what's doing it, but can't say I truly know.

The PC's will run okay in the short-term as long as you don't throw down on them, but I want to make sure my long-term is covered (why do a job twice?).

To the person that asked what video we have in them it's a GeForce FX 5200 (Pretty wild for business class machines that will spend most of their lives doing word, excel, and citrix eh?)

Thanks again for the input...

alright then you doing it right.

as scammy said man, powmax blowz d00d. but the antec is top of the line, at least i never had any probs with them.


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