11.35V from an S12-600W, low enough to cause problems?

[13thmonkey]

I'm having problems booting of my SATA drive on a cold boot, second time around is normally OK. Speedfan is reading 11.3-11.35V on the 12V line, bios reads just touch over 12V, could this be the cause?

I can be fairly eager to blame the PSU, but this does look suspicious. Specs are included below. Didn't expect any trouble from a seasonic, but its been at this voltage since day 1. When running everything is very stable, even under dual prime, but it won't overclock at all, raise FSB to >290 and prime fails within 1sec, although windows works. I doubt the extension cable would cause that big a voltage drop?

Failure mode is that it does not detect an OS, or that the disk is invalid, have done two deep (DOS) scans of the disk and it reports ok. My working theory is that the disk is starting up late into the bios start-up and the bios switches to my old disk, with nothing on it.

 

[13thmonkey]

The bios and speedfan reading are not exactly accuret. But they are close enough to let you know if there is a problem. If you have a volt meter then test one of the molex connectors yourself. The Yellow wire is the +12v. As long as the reading come within 5% of 12v it is fine. I would think your PSU is just fine. I beleive you one the right track with the HDD starting up late. I believe there is a setting in the bios that togles the delay time on the HDD.

Not on my mobo there isn't hmmph (lousy piece of c**p (but is very cheap and good value generally)).

Its reading 11.99 right now, but thats whilst I am doing a dos based disk test. I might move my OS to my old 80Gb and see what happens. It'll be a shame to have to do that though. Will report back in a little while about the OS loaded 12V.

I really dislike having HDD's that you can't be sure you can trust.

OK stuck my meter on it, and its fine, 11.99V from initial turn on onwards.

Not sure what to do next really, given that I do not have a timing option for my SATA or IDE drives.

 

[jough626]

Disable any "quick-boot" feature. Enable one or two extended tests during post. The delay should allow for enough time for the drive to spin up before it trys to load the OS.

 

[13thmonkey]

Disable any "quick-boot" feature. Enable one or two extended tests during post. The delay should allow for enough time for the drive to spin up before it trys to load the OS.

It really doesn't have many of those kinds of options, I'll try and find a memory test, but I don't recall seeing one, I've crawled all over the bios and not found much so far. Back to white on blue screen again I guess.

Just looked, Nope all I have is spread spectrum which is EMI compliance based I believe, anyway one of the asrock emails said to dsiable it so I did. Won't be able to tell till after a cold boot. Will keep you informed. Someone else might find it useful

Thanks anyway though.

 

[merc14]

Make sure you test with the meter while running a benchmark or something? You should stress the whole system while the meter is plugged in.

 

[Doughbuy]

Could it be anything with the configuration of the SATA in bios? Maybe reset the CMOS battery and see if it works. Shrug.

 

[13thmonkey]

Make sure you test with the meter while running a benchmark or something? You should stress the whole system while the meter is plugged in.

It was stable from switch on and for 20 mins after folding at home started full power on 1 CPU, whilst doing other stuff. 11.99-12.00V I Guess thats ok

Doughbuy
No Sata settings, nada zlich, in fact surprisingly few, other raid/not raid.

I thought I had is fixed when I tried new cables, I got so excited that I moved the whole case and rewired everything with the new cable, put it back down again and its still playing up.

Will Check for Bios, I know that I am 1 or 2 behind but they are meant to be on board sound fixes for vista, I'm using XP-home and Xi-Fi, so shouldn't affect me. Will do them anyway.

 

[13thmonkey]

An update, just updated the Bios 1.70 to 1.90, and i've just had two clean boots....

I'm going to turn it off for 10 mins at a time and see what happens now.

And another 2 clean boots. seems to be ok. I do wish that they'd put more detailed information with their Bios updates.

 

[13thmonkey]

Yet another update, after being off for 2 hours, wouldn't boot again.

the little white curosr that sits in the top left that is normally present for seconds at worst stays there for a long time 30s? and the either:

'Error loading OS'
or
'A disk read error occured'

inviting you to use the three fingered salute.

So i'm going to RMA it, its only a few days old so do it now whilst I have the chance, the only problem is I'll probably order a new GPU whilst I'm there.

 

[13thmonkey]

Yet another update, after being off for 2 hours, wouldn't boot again.

the little white curosr that sits in the top left that is normally present for seconds at worst stays there for a long time 30s? and the either:

'Error loading OS'
or
'A disk read error occured'

inviting you to use the three fingered salute.

So i'm going to RMA it, its only a few days old so do it now whilst I have the chance, the only problem is I'll probably order a new GPU whilst I'm there.

RMA... HDD or PSU?

HDD, although I'll strip my old 435W psu from my old machine tomorrow and see what happens with that, I think that the replace period runs out in next few days for PSU. (thinks) hang on PSU is ok, 11.99 is nothing to complain about its all in speedfan thats there a PSU problem. Will strip it out anyway.