Possible PSU/mobo problems; need help

[THEpiGUY]

EDIT: Definitely a PSU problem.
I no longer need help here.

I don't know what's going on here. I woke up yesterday morning to see my motherboard light was flickering on and off, with intervals of about a third of a second. I flipped the PSU switch off then back on, and forgot about the problem.

However, I caught it again; I heard the flickering of the LED from my bed (it's silent out where I live). I'm beginning to worry that some of my hardware may be damaged, but I don't know what it could be. Why would it flicker like that? It's never happened before.

I'm trying to stress my PSU now, monitoring the rails. I don't know a really good stress program, so I'm using ATItool for now. I'd first like suggestions for a good stress tool. But so far the readings look fine after 20 minutes.

12V-12.10 | 5V-5.03 | 3.3V-3.28/3.3

It's been stable so far, and the LED stays lit 100% of the time when it's on. All temperatures are and have been fine. So, any ideas what's going on? Is this a common sign that my PSU is about to crap out? I appreciate all help and suggestions, you guys haven't let me down yet. I'm off to bed now, will catch up with the thread in the morning.

 

[ssc456]

have you checked your motherboard manual ? the flashing light may be some kinda error code

 

[Rudster8161]

run ati-tool and prime 95 on all cores

 

[freestyler105]

Technically, you're not supposed to use software monitoring tools for voltages, you should really get a multimeter and test the PSU. Software tools are wrong a good amount of the time.
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=137886


But yeah, run stability tests like Rudster said.

 

[Rudster8161]

Technically, you're not supposed to use software monitoring tools for voltages, you should really get a multimeter and test the PSU. Software tools are wrong a good amount of the time.
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/showthread.php?t=137886


But yeah, run stability tests like Rudster said.

mine are actually pretty accurate but the prongs fit perfectly into the holes in a molex hookup

 

[THEpiGUY]

Alright, thanks so far. I just had a read through my motherboard manual, and it states: "The system power LED lights up when you turn on the system power, and blinks when the system is in sleep mode." Maybe I have been putting it in sleep mode all along? I usually just push the power button on my case. I'm going to try shutting down via the start menu later today and see if it does the same thing.

If this is it, I'm going to feel like an idiot.

A couple more things though. Is Folding@Home an acceptable substitute for Prime95, or do I just need to stick with Prime? And I may get a multimeter soon, but until then I'll stick with software, though I understand it's not as accurate.

 

[freestyler105]

Yeah, I use Folding@Home to test stability sometimes. It's obviously not as stressful as Prime, but works.

 

[THEpiGUY]

OK, I figured out it wasn't what I initially thought about sleep mode. The problem still persisted after my computer shut itself down. I'm guessing it was due to lack of power, because I left it un-overclocked.

But I may have found the problem. I do have a surge protector, which it was plugged into. Well, I decided to plug my computer into the wall. Nothing that I could see was wrong.

I put it back into the surge protector, booted in to the BIOS, and then shut down. The light flickered immediately afterwards. I did this 6 times, 4 of which the light flickered right after it was turned off.

So then I went back to direct wall power. I went into the BIOS and shut down, to find that nothing happened. Out of 6 times, it didn't flicker once afterwards.

So what do you guys think? I personally think this is enough evidence to say the surge protector is going bad, or just not giving the computer enough power. And as much as I'd like to run 100+ trials instead of 6 to get a better picture, I don't have the time.

 

[lhuser]

Try another power bar, but if it flickers still, the PSU's capacitors and wattage engine is dying. You can have good voltage, but there's also amps, Watts as well.

Problems could come with a cap, a resistor or an amp providing process.

 

[THEpiGUY]

Yeah, I don't know what exactly happened, but I'll leave that up to OCZ to figure out. The PSU definitely went bad. I'm using a spare for now, and I haven't had any instability or flickering of the light whatsoever, even on the surge protector.

Kudos to OCZ though. They emailed me saying that they no longer produced the 520W PowerStreams, and said they could replace it with a GameXStream 600W instead. Pretty awesome, even though it isn't single-rail... I'll take it!