PSU too weak... or ?

[Bourne]

Hi I've been having a few issues now with my computer, basicly it's not usable for anything now exept surfing.

rough hardware description:
All @ stock speed
Corsair HX620w
Intel Q6600
Asus P5K D Wifi/AP
2GB DDR2
8800 GTX
6 x SATA HDD's
6 x 120mm fans

Things started happening in this order:
Note that this is over a few days.
nr. 1 - Games started crashing, (so now I don't play games).
nr. 2 - External Firewire soundcard started getting errors, (so mow I can't use my speakers)
nr. 3 - One of my 1TB drive dissapeared, (my movie collection not accessable)
nr. 4 - Onboard soundcard started getting errors when scrolling, dragging and dropping.
nr. 5 - Me on xtremesystems forums very frustrated

[DAK1640]

PSU s/b plenty of power for that setup

[STEvil]

look at the ram chips, do they have Micron D9 chips?

otherwise it may be the motherboard, P5K are not a long-lasting board.

[Bobsama]

I'm going with STEvil here--odds are bad motherboard or bad RAM.

[zanzabar]

do u have a 6 drive raid array and or are they all spinning up at once when it crashes, if not then i would say ram as well

[sabe]

Sounds like RAM or faulty chipset.

[little_scrapper]

Here is what I would do. First, strip out all the cards and clean out the case/mobo. Use compressed air to get rid of the dust, and concentrate on any slots that remain normally empty to make sure some odd dust or animal hair hasnt gotten into an empty slot causing a intermittant short. Hairs will do that.

Then, I would run that system barebones to test individual cards. Start with 1 HD, 1 stick of ram, and video. And be thorough, play some games, see if the problem persists. If you are able to play games like that then start switching the ram stick to different slots and switch the HD to different sata ports. This is to see if you can roughly determine if the mobo is bad or one of your cards/HDD's are bad. Maybe its just a single port or slot that is causing the issue. Probably not though. If you are still having problems with a barebones settup then try switching to a different ram and HD. If the problem persists after that then you have pretty much narrowed it down to either the PSU, mobo, or vid card.

If the problem goes away then start putting in cards (one at a time) and play for a while with each new card or perriferial until you find a component that causes issues.

Now if you can switch out the vid card and then the PSU and still have issues then you have further narrowed your choice down to pretty muxch the mobo.

If you are not able to do this then you are pretty much forced to buy new stuff to "see" if thats the problem. Ram is probably the cheapest to start with. But I assume you have more then one ram stick to play with so I personally would start w/ the motherboard and work my way out. Sometimes just cleaning out the mobo and reseating all the connections will clear things up.

[Bourne]

Here is what I would do. First, strip out all the cards and clean out the case/mobo. Use compressed air to get rid of the dust, and concentrate on any slots that remain normally empty to make sure some odd dust or animal hair hasnt gotten into an empty slot causing a intermittant short. Hairs will do that.

Then, I would run that system barebones to test individual cards. Start with 1 HD, 1 stick of ram, and video. And be thorough, play some games, see if the problem persists. If you are able to play games like that then start switching the ram stick to different slots and switch the HD to different sata ports. This is to see if you can roughly determine if the mobo is bad or one of your cards/HDD's are bad. Maybe its just a single port or slot that is causing the issue. Probably not though. If you are still having problems with a barebones settup then try switching to a different ram and HD. If the problem persists after that then you have pretty much narrowed it down to either the PSU, mobo, or vid card.

If the problem goes away then start putting in cards (one at a time) and play for a while with each new card or perriferial until you find a component that causes issues.

Now if you can switch out the vid card and then the PSU and still have issues then you have further narrowed your choice down to pretty muxch the mobo.

If you are not able to do this then you are pretty much forced to buy new stuff to "see" if thats the problem. Ram is probably the cheapest to start with. But I assume you have more then one ram stick to play with so I personally would start w/ the motherboard and work my way out. Sometimes just cleaning out the mobo and reseating all the connections will clear things up.

Ok.. that will be my last resort.

Ok here's what I tried... I took one of the ram chips out and boom my 1TB drive pop'd up.
The external soundcard is still getting errors though.
The ram is rated at 4-4-4-12 @ 800MHZ which they were set on, I set the Timings on auto which is 5-5-5-18 and that just made thing worse, I got squeal out the speakers when attempting to play music and ulitize the cpu.

Does that tell you guys anything.

[STEvil]

motherboard.

[ReverendMaynard]

otherwise it may be the motherboard, P5K are not a long-lasting board.

isn't that the truth :yepp: