Computer restarts under load. PSU overloaded?

68flag

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Jul 9, 2012
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While running BOINC for stress testing I notice that my computer would suddenly turn off and restart itself after I run it for about an hour. When it boots back into Windows I get no errors, and the event log shows a Kernel-Power event saying it detected an “unexpected shutdown”, like it would if it suddenly lost power – not a stop error like I would expect to see if the voltages were not set correctly.

This build consists of:

Asus 990fx Sabertooth r2.0
I did not touch the base clock, spread spectrum is disabled, and anything power-saving related (C1E, C&Q) is disabled.

AMD Phenom II x4 965 BE @ 4.3 GHz with 1.48v (Peaks at 52C in BOINC, 46-50 in CPU intensive games like Planetside 2 or PCSX2, idles around 30C)
(I used CPU-Z, Open hardware monitor, SpeedFan and an infrared thermometer to confirm that
those numbers are correct)

Hyper 212+ Heatsink with 1 Excalibur Fan

Nvidia GTX 570 SC With memory @ 1950 (stock), core @ 890 with 1.088v according to MSI Afterburner and Open hardware monitor.

Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 4 GB modules) at 1600 MHz

OCZ ModXstream-Pro 700W PSU

My main concern is that this thing is overloading the PSU by drawing more than 700W, because it appears to only do this when both the CPU and GPU are running close to 100% for a while. I have it running at 4.2 GHz now and appears to be fine (It survived an overnight BOINC session as well as 4 hours of Planetside 2), but if all it took was 100 MHz to set it off I’m a little concerned.

I haven’t been able to find anything about how much power these things draw; I know the Phenoms want stupid amounts of power overclocked, but how much is it? Theres no way this CPU draws 300+ watts of power without generating metric F-tons of heat, is there?

I went to Home Depot to look for a Kill-A-Watt meter today but they didn’t have it in stock, so when I get time I plan on taking the PSU out of another computer, plugging it into the CPU power port on the motherboard then raise the clock to 4.3 again to see what happens.

Does anyone have any opinions as to what is happening?

If you want more information about settings let me know

 

schmuckley

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Jul 18, 2011
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hrm..GTX 570..That pulls some wattage for sure..
Heavily OC'd Deneb..
Yeah..That puts you right at the limit.
If it black screens and just shuts off and restarts..it's triggering OCP.
(You need a bigger PSU)
 

68flag

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Jul 9, 2012
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@schmuckley
Thanks for the reply - I was afraid that would be the case.

I got a chance to pull the corsair tx650 out of my other computer and plug it into the cpu port in the one in question (while leaving the OCZ plugged into everything else). When I ran BOINC the fan on the tx650 started to rev up.
According to the box it came with the fan revs up if the PSU is loaded to 50%, which would mean that the CPU alone is drawing close to 325 watts by itself ... does that sound right?

Add the 300-400 watts that I know the GTX 570 uses and that puts us, like you said, at the limit.

So now the question is what should I buy? Would I want a 800-850W psu or should I shoot for 1000 for good measure, or would that be overkill?

Because I didn't plan on spending $200 on another PSU, I wonder if I could buy a 500w psu for like $50, then have it just power the CPU like I just did with the one in my other computer, while having the OCZ power everything else. It worked just fine when I tried it. Has anyone else tried something similar?

Thanks again for the comments


 

68flag

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Jul 9, 2012
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Does anyone have anything to add?

Even though I've gotten this system stable so far, I've been reading horror stories about the ModXStreams failing catastrophically (capaciters exploding - frying motherboards) when they are pushed like this, so I think I would need to act sooner rather than later.

Is there anything wrong with getting, for example, a CX500, and just plugging it into the CPU for however long it would take me to buy a more appropriate PSU?