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Thinking Power Supply, Maybe Mobo?

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  • Power Supplies
  • Boot
  • Components
Last response: in Components
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May 29, 2011 8:05:27 PM

Okay, so it seems every time that I cold boot my system from overnight, the first boot will result in fans twitching, lights flashing (video card lights -- GTX 470 superOC from gigabyte, if you've seen this card you've seen the landing strip of lights on it), and CD drives click/flash. Also looks like maybe the front fans are flashing. At any rate, after about 5-10 seconds of that, my system will POST, but it will not show my hard drives, then I'll CAD and It'll show my WD Black 640, but not my OCZ V2 90GB, and will obviously ask me to insert a boot disk. No amount of CADing will fix this. So, once I hit the power button, and turn it back on, voilĂ , there's both drives and it boots into Windows and everything works fine the rest of the time. Haven't BSOD or anything like that, and I've been stressing it with games...

So what are your thoughts? Possibly PSU? Maybe motherboard?

EDIT:

Added thought, I also get this often when sleeping my system; BSOD on wakeup before it gets back into Windows, or it doesn't sleep properly because it hangs and the lights/fans will stay on until I press the keyboard to wake it up, which is when it BSODs. Then, the event log shows "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\DR3" and "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly," with a log name of "System" and a source of "Kernel-Power."

More about : thinking power supply mobo

a c 97 ) Power supply
May 30, 2011 12:26:56 AM

"This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly"

This might be a clue!

Is the PSU 650 Watts or better? Probably PSU rather than mobo.
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May 30, 2011 12:42:26 AM

Yeah, but the controller error also points towards motherboard as well. It's a 700W PSU, OCZ GameXStream, about four years old. In fact, my whole system, minus RAM/Videocard is roughly four years old. It's intermittent though, because I only BSOD out of sleep 25% of the time, and it has only occurred with a SSD in the system (which this is my second SSD from OCZ because the first one died, however it had the same issue with sleeping).

Just wondering if there's any easy way to solve this without replacing the PSU :( . Perhaps a PSU tester might show unstable results? Then again, once it's on, it has no issues.

I plan to replace mobo/cpu down the road, but I am not sure if I should wait for any upcoming changes, such as the 22nm Intel CPUs, or perhaps a change upcoming I haven't heard of yet like "PCI Express x16 3.0"

However, I am starting to agree that it might be PSU too. Anyone else have any thoughts?
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a c 97 ) Power supply
May 30, 2011 12:46:04 AM

Just take one thing at a time. Check your system with a different, known-good PSU of 700 Watts or better. Go from there.
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