Hi all,
I've been having a problem with an Alienware PC I bought earlier this year, I think I've got it nailed down to being a power issue but wanted some clarification before I contact their support.
Let me just quickly summarise the system specs:
Vista 32bit
Nvidia Nforce 790I Ultra motherboard
XFX Nvidia Geforce GTX 295 1792MB Graphics Card
4GB (2 x 2GB) Patriot DDR3 RAM
Intel E8200 2.66Mhz CPU
1000W OEM ATX PSU
What's happening is that the system is shutting down randomly whenever I'm doing anything fairly graphically intensive (gaming, in other words). It is literally completely random in that I've had it last for almost 5 weeks once without ever once doing it, even though I was continuing to play the likes of Crysis and Far Cry2 at max settings, yet other times it will do it 3 or 4 times in one evening. I've only had these random shutdowns happen when I'm gaming and never when just web browsing or watching movies. Additionally, I've never had one happen within the first hour or so of the PC being turned on, if it's going to do it then it's usually at least an hour after the PC has been on. There's never anything useful in the Event Log about it.
It was that second point that initially made me suspect an overheating issue. However, I installed Riva Tuner and the temperature of both GPUs is averaging at about 45 degrees during a gaming session. I've never once seen a temperature readout of higher than 51 degrees. I also used Riva Tuner to manually force the main fan to run permanently but still had a random shutdown.
Although I believed it unlikely that it was the RAM at fault, I ran memtest86 on both sticks of RAM and it didn't find any errors.
To me, the only other option is power but, with that 1000W PSU that Alienware have put in there, there should be more than enough juice as Nvidia recommend a 480W PSU for this card. I noticed the card requires both a 6 pin PCI-E power cable and an 8 pin PCI-E power cable and the PSU doesn't have native 8 pin output so they've used a 6 pin to 8 pin adaptor but, with 1000W total capacity, I shouldn't think that would be a problem.
Anyone got any further suggestions?