randomly crashing: possible PSU problem

[smee204]

My motherboard had broken (it kept loosing sata hdd drives) so I purchased and installed a new motherboard and did a clean install of win7 64bit.

Sometimes my pc will lock up and display a garbbled screen (the screen will go wierd colours and have lots of lines) so I have to turn it off, then sometimes it will not boot after that for a few attempts.
Another problem is sometimes the mouse will just slow down so it becomes very sluggish and jerky.

What could be causing this problem and how should I go about diagnosing it? I have a feeling it could be my psu but I am not sure how to test it.

thanks

[smee204]

My Hardware Details

CPU- Core2Duo E6750 2.66 GHz
motherboard- ASUS P5Q SE PLUS
ram- 4x 1gb DDR2 PC2-4200 533MHz
graphics- ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro
hdd- 4x sata drives
PSU- iGreen Coolmaster 500W

[nightkhaos]

Right do you have a 500W+ PSU laying around you house you could try? It would rule out the PSU.

[jordan427]

Possibly overheating? Corrupt GPU memory, could be all things to be honest with you!

[smee204]

I will swap out the PSU later today. I have run lots of burnin and stress tests and heat is definatly not an issue. It ran fine for several hours then I stopped testing it and just left it on the desktop and 15/30 mins later it had crashed and the screen was all white.

[smee204]

My ram runs at 533Mhz but my motherboard says for ram lower than 667Mhz it may not boot. Could this be the problem?

[nightkhaos]

My ram runs at 533Mhz but my motherboard says for ram lower than 667Mhz it may not boot. Could this be the problem?

I wouldn't rule it out... see what happens if you change you RAM frequency to 667MHz, assuming your RAM support 667MHz... overclocking RAM is a bit more risky than overclocking a CPU.

[smee204]

Found out that my motherboard is automatically running my ram at 667MHz and there is no option to run it any slower. It failed memtest86+ also but I cant get it to fail again.

[nightkhaos]

Found out that my motherboard is automatically running my ram at 667MHz and there is no option to run it any slower. It failed memtest86+ also but I cant get it to fail again.

So... it's passing now, but it was failing before? Sorry?

[smee204]

seems to be

It seems to have fixed itself somehow!