PC ACTING UP

[alizee]

Its been almost about 9 months since i bought my PC it got an E7400 4 gb ddr2 ram and a sapphire 4670 1gb ddr3 . . and a 300W power supply which is very cheap . . .yeah and a dg31pr motherboard none of the stuff was used or aanything . . .now my problem is that after about a month of usage my 250gb seagate HDD sort of died like stopped loading windows and all so i gt it replaced with a 320gb seagate HDD the second one followed the same pattern and aftetr about a month and a half started making odd noises not like the clicking of death but a bit more subtle. . .so i gt tht changed with a Maxtor 320gb Hdd and after about a month it started the same thing again . . . plz help . . .I keep my Pc nice and cool monitor the temperatures and all but still no fix . .. . .plz help someone any1

 

[saint19]

Hi newcomer and welcome to the Tom's hardware forum.

Could it be ur PSU.

 

[alizee]

Hi newcomer and welcome to the Tom's hardware forum.

Could it be ur PSU.

if its my PSU shudnt the other things be going bad aswell . .. . .. .its like a pattern everytime i gt a new hard disk it takes a certain amount of time for it to get messed up

 

[saint19]

Not really, the problem in the PSU could be only in the power line that goes to the HD.

 

[lordszone]

if its my PSU shudnt the other things be going bad aswell . .. . .. .its like a pattern everytime i gt a new hard disk it takes a certain amount of time for it to get messed up

Hi
Bro your psu is currently the most likely thing doing this. it is because as u said very cheap and also is a 300W which is not enough for the hardwares u have. if u were using an inbuilt vga card then things might have been ok but not now. i suggest upgrade your psu and things will be fine. and maybe your old hdds work fine on it as well. This should be a lesson to all who thinks that psu isnt a good place to invest. Pentium 4 days are over where 300W psu worked fine, its core i days where good psu are a must. Hope i helped.

 

[moody89]

+1 to what lordszone said

These are the official minimum recommended power specs for a system based on your graphics card:

400 Watt or greater power supply (550 Watt for ATI CrossFireX™ technology in dual mode) is recommended

As you can see you're well under the minimum recommended. Add to this the fact that you said it's a cheap PSU and it looks like you've found the issue. As lordszone rightly said a PSU isn't the place to try to save money on. To be honest, you're pretty lucky you haven't noticed any other issues with your system but I'd say that on that PSU it wouldn't be long until you do. Some poor quality PSUs can even take other components out with them when they go. It's unfortunate that you had to spend so much money on new HDDs before you found the root of the problem. You may be lucky and the HDDs may still work although its also possible that they may have been damaged. Recommended brands for a new PSU are Corsair, Seasonic, and the newer Antec models. You can't go wrong with these. If you need more advice or recommendations post back and let us know. Best of luck