Bad Mosfet Symptoms

[jrhii]

So, I may or may not be having some problems with my MSI 870a-G54.

It doesn't come with mofset cooling and I fear I may have messed that up.

It doesn't seem to crash when running games and anything else, but it will when I plug in more than 3 USB devices or put in a second gfx card)

I RMA'd it and they sent an open box one, and the problem seems to have faded away...does this sound like a bad mofset problem, or will a mobo just be plain dead?

I have my ram at 1.63v and my cpu at 1.48v. Now, I still haven't finished rerunning it for stable and I know i had to raise my NB voltage which was causing crashes on prime 95 (which the old mobo wasn't but still crashing) and it is handling usb and video cards fine.


The quesion: should I get some mofset coolers just to be sure?

 

[Shadow703793]

Those USB devices may be drawing too much power.

 

[RazberyBandit]

While I agree with Shadow, I think it's more complicated.

I believe the crashes are being caused by an overall lack of power. This is mostly due to the extent of your overclock, which is easily pushing the 150+ Watt range. All boards have an eventual limit to how much power they can provide, which varies from board to board due to their design. It seems obvious this board just doesn't have the capacity to power so many devices while maintaining such a powerful overclock, which only seems to become even more obvious by failed attempts to add a 2nd graphics card.

I've viewed the board's specs and photos on MSI's site, which show a 4-pin CPU power connector. I tend to think this board is simply not designed for the high-output power draw which your system build requires.

 

[jrhii]

Well, currently, I have the replacement board and I have had no problems, with the OC back to 4.0 and the 2nd video card (this isn't xfire or sli, just for an extra 2 task monitora...i.e. not games, just office and the like) and I have loaded up all the usb ports, including 4 on the front of my case, so this seems to be working, other than the NB wasn't stable, so i dropped it back down to 2000.

I should mention that the freezing happened even on stock. I want to know if I should add some mosfet coolers though.

 

[Poisoner]

With all that gear you have in there, you could of put more into that motherboard. Going cheap on the motherboard is almost as bad as going cheap on the PSU.