Got texts of Mrs Pook while at work today.. basically, the PC keeps switching off.. Didn;t think too much about it until I got home, and it did it to me as well. It's as if the power lead has been pulled. No freezing, no BSOD, no weirdness... no crashing... it just powers down. The PSU is not hot, and to establish whether it's a power supply problem of not, I ran 2 instances of Prime 95, encoded a DVD, defragged my drives, and ran 3DMark05 simultaneously... flawless.. then just sitting there doing sweet FA, it powers down again. I've established that the PSU can obviously supply the required amps without voltage problems, but I still think the PSU is faulty. What say you all? PSU, or some other pain in the ass fault that will be a complete mare to diagnose?
Powerdown seems a bit odd; PSU problems usually result in reboots. If you've got a spare unit, I'd just swap that out anyway - it's easy to replace and sounds a likely culprit. If that's not it, I'd suspect the motherboard over any other component because there's more things that can cause that if they go wrong.
I've no other PSU suitable unfortunately. What makes me think it's the PSU is that when I shut down normally, the PSU fan comes on for 5 mins to cool it down. It does this whether it's needed or not. However, when this fault occurs.. it doesn't. It just goes dead, and no fan comes on. Now surely if a mobo fault made it shut down, it would still activate the fan as normal. It's as if the PSU has gone into some sort of safety shutdown mode. What mobo fault can cause that? I would imagine that nomrally only a short circuit, or extreme overheating would do that. It's not even warm so we can rule out the latter, and I've checked cabling. Baffled. I've prodded, poked, and wiggled everything and can't get it to fail on demand. It seems totally random.
Pretty much exactly the same thing happened to my parents computer. It has been doing so since last summer but steadily got worse. I tried using minimal power usage by swapping the graphics card, unplugging some fans, lights and a hdd and the problem still came about. Tried seeing if overheating the computer causes it but the problem is just completely random. In the end I swapped the PSU to an enermax Liberty and it's been fine ever since. Faulty/worn out PSU if you ask me, especially if the below is true. Does the PSU require a turn off at the back for about 10 seconds before you can turn it on again? Pressing the front power button does nothing?
If you're saying it's as if the power cable has been pulled, have you checked it? Make sure the connection between than and the PSU is good, and possibly try it in another socket. Might just be that.
Yeah, I've checked teh cable.. first thing I did. I've been embarrassed by overlooking the obvious too many times to let that happen again I think it's just b0rked. Shame really, cos it's a great PSU.. or was. It's clearly a reliability issue then, and that makes me think if I should replace it with another Hiper. It's the Ballistix scenario all over again. ANyone else had a Hiper fail?
Well, I'm the self appointed(and mass-hated) PSU critic, and they're not bad PSU's from what I've read, doesn't seem to be much of a higher random failure rate then any other decent PSU's. If you were happy with it, get another
Hiper (IMO) have never had what I'd class as a "quality" reputation. Does sound like its a PSU issue however, might just be worth unhooking everthing and checking he connections though...
Agreed! If you're wanting to go down the modular route, a Tagan Easycon or an Enermax Liberty would be a good option. Got the 500W version here and it's sound
Whatever it was seems to have rectified itself. Will watch out for it.. if it happens again.. bye bye Hiper. I did reroute some cables tho... there's a possibility that the case may have nipped a cable, and shorted to ground, but there's no evidence of damage to any of the cables.
