I tend to agree with the power supply theory. Was the make and model of the PS ever determined?
In the Jan 2005 issue of Maximum PC (http://www.maximumpc.com/issue_date/january_2005/) there is an atricle testing 7 ~500 watt power supplies and a 400 watt reference power supply. Of the 8 PS tested, 5 including the referenced failed the tests. One power supply rated at 520 watts could not even sustain 284 watts of output (drawing 378 watts of AC power multiplied by an efficiency factor of 75% is roughly 284 watts). It repeatedly crashed the test system during the load tests. Another 500 watt power supply did not crash the system, but caused strange white lines to appear on a black test screen and emitted a burning smell. The test system was a 3.4 GHz P4 with 3GB ram, GeFroce 6800 256MB video card, 2 7,200rpm ata drives and 2 15,000rpm scsi drives, 2 optical drives, SB Live! sound card, NIC and 2 120mm case fans. The results: not all power supplies are equal, and strange things can happen when the system is starved of power. Brett > Power at this house is fine. We've not had any problems as far as i can > tell, and the box is on a ups that's good, so i don't think it's that > either. > > So, no overheating, I seriously dout the ps is defective, though i guess > anything is possible. What else would that leave? heh > On Wed, 7 Dec 2005, Duncan wrote: > Random Thought: --------------- * m2 stares at the monitor... it looks like a hamburger... <Knghtbrd> m2 - that's a bad sign -- [email protected] mailing list
