Is my PSU on the way out??

[chez]

My system -

Enermax 430w PSU (the one with the adjustable fan)
Abit IC7 Max3
P4 3.0C
2x 512Mb Corsair XMS3500
74Gb WD Raptor
2x 200Gb Seagate ATA100 7200.7s
Gainward 128Mb GF4 Ti4200 Golden Sample
M-Audio Audiophile 2496

My system had been running fine but recently, has started crashing quite often.

It is as though the power is going (before it actually crashes, the HDDs sound as though they stop and spin up again).

I thought I'd have a look at my voltages etc just in case and get this from Abit EQ -



The 3.3V line looks ominously low...

Could my PSU be on it's last legs or could this be something else??

Thanks
Chez

[Shogun]

Can you try and take the voltages such as 12v and 5v using a mutlimeter? Motherboards give off readings most of the times which doesn't help. Does the pc only crash when you are stressing it or just in windows? Also how does it crash? Does it reboot/give a bsod/just stop responding?

[myth]

click the arows under the voltage meters on that abit iq! it will show you the 12v and 5 volts as a graph!!!! Post a pic!

[Platinum]

Yea agreed dont trust the mobos readouts, a multimeter is the only way to know for definate.
What sort of crashes are you getting? is the CPU clocked? is the ram at default timings? tryed the system with the case panel off to elimitate overheating?
Able to try another PSU?

[chez]

I've disconnected everything from the system except the CPU Fan, video card, sound card and one HDD and my 3.3v line went back to 3.25v...

I then reconnected my 2 200gb drives and it stayed at 3.25v

The only things left to reconnect are a DVD-RW and DVD-ROM.

Surely optical drives can't take that much power??

[bmh.01]

Only the motherboard uses the 3.3v rail anyway so I can't see the optical drives causing the voltage drop, but if they do then theres got to be something wrong with the power supply.

[chez]

Well, the PC has been on now for 2 days without the optical drives connected and hasn't crashed once.

The 3.3v reading in AbitEQ has stayed at 3.25v!!

Strange...