Current PSU insufficient?
 

Okay, first off, I've had some interesting issues.

My chipset fan sometimes buzzes loudly. At first I thought this was because metal fan grill was bent and rubbing against it. I put a few notches in it with a needlenose bending the grill back, but it still made some (but less) buzzing.

Simultaneously, I ordered a second 512 stick of ram for my computer and couldn't get my computer to boot with both sticks. I had success at least once with each stick alone, but not together. I thought about trying dual channel, but the sticks are not identical. Whenever I would boot with both sticks my monitor never came on. No picture, no beeps, nothing. Sometimes I would have to reseat the ram to get my computer to boot, or it could be that reseating it was irrelevant. This is about the time I started suspecting my PSU. It's a 350W originally included with my case. So, I unplugged my CD/DVD drive and my hard disks, and my computer powered on. I couldn't do much here though, so I turned it off, and repowered everything and rebooted, and here I am now.

Also, my chipset fan which was buzzing seems to be running fine. I'm suspecting that the buzzing was a low-voltage issue. Odd thing is, it had started buzzing recently since I loosened it for dust cleanup. I suppose it could be a couple of problems with that fan.

So my questions: Could my PSU be underpowered, close to death, etc? Also, how do I calculate my power requirements? If I'm wrong in suspecting my PSU, what are other options for diagnosis?

For the curious, my setup, as far as I can remember:

MSI 865PE Neo2 socket 478
P4 2.66 Ghz
AGP graphics card: Nvidia GeForce 5200FX 128MB
1 Kingston PC 2700 512 module, plus my new PC 3200 of the same brand.
2 Western Digital hard disks, 80 and 250GB.
A CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive.
Turbolink LC-A350ATX PSU.

If you made it all the way to here, thanks for reading my long post.

--Ariox
:edit: Corrected PSU wattage

A 250W power supply seems a tad small, IMHO. I recommend this power supply calculator to see about how much power you need for your system.

Sorry about the mistype, it is actually 350W.

Very helpful calculator. Current recommended requirement calculates to 282 watts. A bit lower than I expected.

Also, as an afterthought, I'm having 'USB device not recognized' issues with a certain device - could this be an issue with underpowered usb ports?

Doesn't sound like a PSU problem at all. Check your mainboard for bad caps (rusty looking or bulged capacitors). It really sounds like this is the problem looking at the symptoms.

Your fan might not be properly mounted. You could try replacing it by an passive Zalman one if the noise matters.

I really hate %$#! cheap !%#$ fans. Can't wait to eliminate all the moving parts in my PC actually. Liquid cooling and solid state hard drives... hmmmm... :D

Already found the fanless power supply I'm going to use: http://www.bigbruin.com/reviews/ttfanlesspsu/

Oh, have no idea what's wrong with it. But if you suspect PSU best way to eliminate possibility is by swapping with a know good one and running through your test regimen again.

Since you mention that the Ram sticks are not identical it might be an issue with the BIOS setting the wrong speed for the Ram.Did you have both sticks in when you tried w/o HD's and CD?

Try to manually set the speed of the Ram a notch lower than the Bios sets it automatically and see what that does.

Did you already had boot problems before? Like machine not booting the first time.

I didn's suspect my motherboard, but I checked twice to be sure. I can't visually find any sign of a failed component.


You've just reminded me of something I totally forgot about. Once when booting with my original RAM only, I got a "DRAM timing too tight" error message. If I remember correctly, it asked me to do a flash recovery, during which my system would hang and require a hard reboot. I can't believe I forgot that...

Related topics by Google:

http://forums.hardwarezone.com/showthread.php?t=1092830
This person is using a similar model mainboard and the same DDR400 Kingston 512.

http://forums.vr-zone.com/showthread.php?p=2756567
Also similar motherboard model.

Also I found this article http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fma/P4tweakRAM2.htm
which has a somewhat helpful explanation for me. Can someone please clarify this paragraph?

--A

Go into the BIOS and select Fail-Safe settings. The BIOS will use settings that the manufacture states as Fail-Safe settings. Not all motherboard manufactures have a way to force default CPU and memory speed upon a key press at boot up, so check your manual.

Using fanless power supplies still need a fan or else the air around it will not be cool enough to cool off the components.

I recommend buying power supplies from brands that already knows how to make power supplies. The brands that I recommend are Enermax, Seasonic, and Power & Cooling. Seasonic been in the business longer than many power supply manufactures. Also Seasonic makes the quietest and most efficient power supplies.

Thermaltake's noiseless power supplies are ok but designed poorly. It still relies on air movement, so you still have to invest in fans if your room temperature is too hot.

Speakers can be used to move air instead of using fans. Soon manufactures will use speakers to cool off electronics. Optical electronics will also come soon which does not produce any heat and it is a lot faster than today's electronics.

Solid-state hard drives costs a lot of money. If they are using NAND Flash memory, these solid-state hard drives can only store data for ten years and they have limited writes and reads. Also solid-state hard drives are impossible to retrieve data from corrupt sectors. Nanotechnology have to be used to retrieve data from a failed solid-state hard drive.

Should work fine in a tower case, as long as hot air continues to rise anyway. And they didn't just take the fans off. There's a peltier between the heat sink inside and the one outside. ;)
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Peltier_effect

Peltier heating/cooling elements still need a heatsink on the hot side (depending on the polarity) because they too get damage by excessive heat.

Thermaltake's noiseless power supplies uses heatpipe technology to bring the heat from the inside to the outside. They do not use peltiers.

Hot air will fill the entire case, so it does not matter about the size. The hot air needs to be taken out and only fans can do this inexpensively because they displace more air than other means that might be more expensive.

Interesting thing about that, I changed it to BIOS defaults and it worked... once. Changed something once, and default didn't work again. Turns out, I find out after so many hours, that BIOS default sets the ram speed to Auto. I changed it to 333 Mhz and everything is fine now. Happy day. One thing that bothers me though, is that my motherboard manual says DDR400 is the highest RAM speed allowed, whereas BIOS seems to imply that it' 333. Hm.

Because my comuter doesn't seem to handle DDR400, is it viable to underclock my new stick of ram and try dual channel? Also, is there a way to calculate how to set my timing optimally? Right now it's at BIOS failsafe, 2.5 4 4 8.

To all who responded, thanks for your help and suggestions. I would have still been in the dark if not for them.

--Ariox

You mentioned that one of your sticks of memory is PC2700... which is DDR333... It seems obvious to me that your system would become unstable if you set the RAM speed to 400MHz.

Ariox, interestingly I just went through a similar thing. I have been using a cheap 350W power supply myself for the last two years. I power a Radeon 9600XT card with it and play FarCry a bit.

I began to notice glitches playing the game which got progressively worse over time to the point where even my usb devices like the card reader started failing (during non game work).

I blamed the video card at first, but when the usb devices started failing I looked elsewhere.

I ended up buying an Antec Neo 450 PSU and all the problems went away.

So my guess would be that your PSU could very well be slowly dying. Best to get a good value but strong PSU like the Antec if for no other reason than it is good insurance if your current PSU pops and takes out some devices with it.