Is it my power supply?

[KidChameleon]

I noticed this afternoon that my PC was idling at 170w when it's normally at about 120w. I ran folding@home to put a full load on the cpu and gpu and it was running at 280w, again about 50w more than usual. I recently changed the overclock to 3.9GHz up from the usual 3.2GHz, so I decided to reboot and reduce the clock back to 3.2GHz. It got to the Windows logo and froze, right when a few pixels of colour in the logo appeared. I rebooted and Windows suggested a startup repair, so I chose that and it wouldn't finish loading before freezing. So I took the overclock right off and still couldn't boot into Windows. I've tried running memtest 3.4 but it keeps freezing after a few minutes, apart from a blinking cursor.

Over the last few months, the PC has occaisionally frozen not long after booting up. The PSU is a Corsair HX520 bought in January 2007, and it's probably been running nearly a third of that total time with being on most of the day. I'm wondering if it's on its way out or if there's another problem I should be looking at.


Edit: I've just checked the voltages in the bios. +5v is 4.999 and +12v is 12.239 to 12.302. Is that 12v reading a long way off normal?

[watercooled]

12v is fine if it's correct:


It sounds like it could be the PSU, do you have another one to try with?

[sadbuttrue]

50w is roughly the difference between 2d idle and 3d idle clocks on modern gfx cards. Have you recently added a second monitor?

[KidChameleon]

I've always had two monitors. I have another power supply, but it's a cheapish 450w and I'm not sure about powering a 5850 with it.

I opened the case to check loose cables but didn't notice any. When I rebooted, it veeeerrrry slowly got into the startup recovery, did a system restore, then veeeeerrrry slowly booted into Windows. One of the hard drives was missing from explorer so I rebooted and checked in the bios where it also wasn't showing up. I checked the cables again and rebooted and it seemed fine after that. HD Tune doesn't show any errors on the drive. Maybe it's a bad SATA cable. I think I've had problems with very slow booting before when a data cable was plugged in, but not the power cable.

[watercooled]

Ignoring the power draw, it sounds like it could be a bad/failing hard drive. Since it's hard to get into Windows, boot into something like Parted Magic and check the SMART data on the drives.
Hmm, but that shouldn't cause Memtest to fail, are you using the Windows-based one or the bootable one?

[KidChameleon]

Ignoring the power draw, it sounds like it could be a bad/failing hard drive. Since it's hard to get into Windows, boot into something like Parted Magic and check the SMART data on the drives.
Hmm, but that shouldn't cause Memtest to fail, are you using the Windows-based one or the bootable one?

Memtest was the bootable one. The PC has been fine today. Very strange.