P5W DH Deluxe and Seasonic S12 500w Issue

[julian.day17]

I have been testing my system config for 3 weeks now tearing my hair out as it was an intermittant fault, which i have finally tracked down to the PSU.

The PSU is a Seasonic 500W S12 PSU Version 2.0 model is SS-500HT Active PFC F3

We have built 2 test workstations,

System config is

Akasa Eclipse Case
2 Qty Seagate 320GB.10 RAID 1 SATA Drives
Intel Core2 Duo 1.86GHZ
Corsair Twinx 1GB PC 8500 5-5-5-15 kit
ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard Bios 1301 and als tried 1406
Asus ATI X1600 PCI 256MB DDR3 graphics card
Samsung 18x Light scribe DVD Writer.

1 workstation has Seasonic s12 500W and 1 workstation s12 600W

1 has a Seasonic S12 600W PSU This I believe is version 1.0 as it has the Q Fan control connector to reduce system noise. The 600W one works and boots system every time and is noticeably quieter than the 500W.

However when the 500W one is connected and powered on the system does not boot always up. The system powers on ie light is on the motherboard indicating power, the fans spin, the cd rom light flashes and the hard drives spin up.

But it does not beep and start the bios screen but the PSU stays on.



This situation is remedied by pressing the reset button 2-3 times or turning the power on and off a few times.

Once it boots then it will continue working fine even when the restart happens.



However if you shutdown the machine for just a short time i.e. 2 minutes then power it on it works. If you have the machine powered off for more than 15 minutes you get the same problem of the system not starting bios.



I have changed memory, bios revision as per asus advice but this made no difference. I also set the board to low voltage options for as many items to test this but none made a difference. However I have just changed the PSU in the system from the 500W to the 600W and then every time it boots up with no issues.



My suspicion is that the PSU is locking up so the motherboard does not get the required voltage at the time it requires on start up, due to a voltage irregularity in a capacitor but I am not an electrician so can not confirm.

So 2 questions
1) has anyone else seen problems with seasonic 500w psu
2) anyone else had problems like this with asus p5w dh Deluxe motherboard?

[jms45]

i havent had problems with your mentioned pruducts but i have had similiar problems a while back with my old system, i had a qtec 400watt psu and it started acting up when i upgraded a graphics card, my system would power up and turn off again and i would have to keep turning on and off until i got it to boot up, after replacing the power supply the problem went away so i think it's probably worth while getting a new psu

[julian.day17]

PS have produced this identical problem on 2 systems

[julian.day17]

i havent had problems with your mentioned pruducts but i have had similiar problems a while back with my old system, i had a qtec 400watt psu and it started acting up when i upgraded a graphics card, my system would power up and turn off again and i would have to keep turning on and off until i got it to boot up, after replacing the power supply the problem went away so i think it's probably worth while getting a new psu

did you replace for the same psu or a higher wattage one?

[MarauderMat]

I'm noticing a trend here of people having various complaints regarding the ASUS p5w series motherboards. Is that because they're the biggest seller on the Scan site, or are they just plain dodgy?

[jms45]

i replaced it with a higher wattage one, a 600watt if i remember right with 33amps on the 12v rail, compared to the 400watt qtec with about 20amps on the 12v rail.

[jms45]

i just had a look at your psu and it has 2x 12v rails = 12v1-17amps + 12v2-16 thats 33 amps combined which looking at your system should be enough, so to me it looks like the power supply is faulty, have you tried moving your devices to different power cables maybe your over populating one of the 12v rails?, also check in your bios under power menu to see if acpi version 2.0 support is enabled as your 500 watt psu is version 2.0

[julian.day17]

I'm noticing a trend here of people having various complaints regarding the ASUS p5w series motherboards. Is that because they're the biggest seller on the Scan site, or are they just plain dodgy?

Am not sure about this maybe its a general asus issue? In space of 30 mins whilst i was testing my pc at scan I saw 2 people come in with asus board faults all different 1 was totally dead and the person who owned it said he used asus boards for years no problems then in Maybe someone from scan could see what the returns /fault rates are for ASUS products to see if %age has increased recently?

Note once you get the system running and configured corrrectly its rock solid on this board

[julian.day17]

i just had a look at your psu and it has 2x 12v rails = 12v1-17amps + 12v2-16 thats 33 amps combined which looking at your system should be enough, so to me it looks like the power supply is faulty, have you tried moving your devices to different power cables maybe your over populating one of the 12v rails?, also check in your bios under power menu to see if acpi version 2.0 support is enabled as your 500 watt psu is version 2.0

ACPI is enabled, I built the system so only 1 connector is used on each of leads coming out of the PSU, so in summaryu 1 lead for DVD 1 lead for SATA disk 1 and 1 lead for SATA disk 2.

[jms45]

well in that case m8 i would have to say the power supply has a fault of some kind, your better off claiming the warranty if possible or buying a new power supply

[Gibb0N]

I've had an almost exact same problem with my system,

ASUS P5B Deluxe
Seasonic 500w
7950 gx2
2 gig ddr2 800mhz
16mb 74 gig raptor
core2duo e6600

It will not post. I've tried a different GPU and no luck. I've stripped everything out of the system and put it all back in and still nothing. Have reset the cmos and cleared the bios several times and tried booting with just the cpu in and with nothing in at all. It will not beep. I haven't been able to try different ram in it and I haven't considered trying a different psu because it is easily enough power to boot up.

I've already arranged to RMA the motherboard on Wednesday. I've managed to get a 520W Tangan on loan tomorrow, so I'll try it then and see what happens.

[MarauderMat]

Am not sure about this maybe its a general asus issue? In space of 30 mins whilst i was testing my pc at scan I saw 2 people come in with asus board faults all different 1 was totally dead and the person who owned it said he used asus boards for years no problems then in Maybe someone from scan could see what the returns /fault rates are for ASUS products to see if %age has increased recently?

Note once you get the system running and configured corrrectly its rock solid on this board

Well this is the thing.... Asus are generally known for producing immense products for motherboards, but then there have been 3 different complaints in a row regarding the p5w.

I'm beginning to wonder if I will have the same problem with the P5N32-sli premium when it comes out.... not that it's gonna stop me from buying it.

[julian.day17]

Last night removed all power connections to 2 HDD and cd rom and still would not boot. After browsing asus forum I noticed quite a lot of people have issues with 500 W or less PSU with asus boards. Additionally have now also got conformation that 2 other issues are related to this PSU problem.

1) 16 firewireports sometimes show up in bios check even when firewire is disabled. This also can cause XP to boot slowly i.e. 30 minutes to start.
2) When board boots up sometimes it gives message overclocking failed and resorts to default pc 533 memory setting.

Several people have had similar problems then upgraded PSU to 600W quality make then problem goes away.

[Clunk]

I've had an almost exact same problem with my system,

ASUS P5B Deluxe
Seasonic 500w
7950 gx2
2 gig ddr2 800mhz
16mb 74 gig raptor
core2duo e6600

It will not post. I've tried a different GPU and no luck. I've stripped everything out of the system and put it all back in and still nothing. Have reset the cmos and cleared the bios several times and tried booting with just the cpu in and with nothing in at all. It will not beep. I haven't been able to try different ram in it and I haven't considered trying a different psu because it is easily enough power to boot up.

I've already arranged to RMA the motherboard on Wednesday. I've managed to get a 520W Tangan on loan tomorrow, so I'll try it then and see what happens.

if that P5b has the old bios that ships with it, then the chances are that its the ram thats stopping you booting. if you can borrow some bog standard ram, just a single stick will do and flash the bios to the latest one, you should be ok.

[Clunk]

Last night removed all power connections to 2 HDD and cd rom and still would not boot. After browsing asus forum I noticed quite a lot of people have issues with 500 W or less PSU with asus boards. Additionally have now also got conformation that 2 other issues are related to this PSU problem.

1) 16 firewireports sometimes show up in bios check even when firewire is disabled. This also can cause XP to boot slowly i.e. 30 minutes to start.
2) When board boots up sometimes it gives message overclocking failed and resorts to default pc 533 memory setting.

Several people have had similar problems then upgraded PSU to 600W quality make then problem goes away.

The problem that you described in your first post is what the board does when its recovering from a bad overclock, it is the boards own way of saving you resetting the cmos with a jumper.

You should manually enter the ram timings and the sub timings, and remove any overclocks for now, see if it is stable at stock speeds.

[Tak]

Might be worth reading this and this.