Project Reality Forums

At times I get random restarts, mostly under load. Could the PSU be aging? Its 2 to 3 years old.

I have 500 Watt of Sharkoon so it isnt a noname PSU and I am running an Phenom II 720 X3 2,8 (overclocked to 3,4) with the 4th core unlocked some voltaged and a radeon HD 5850. Other than that I have like 4 USB devices an 3 Hard drives with a burner.

So a regular off the mill sytem.

I tried to enter all that in some PSU calculators and with 20% capacitor aging they put the min. at over 400 Watts and the maximum load at just under 500 Watt. So according to that my PSU could be hitting its limit occasionally.

But can a max load of just under 500 Watts be right for such an run off the mill system?

Granted the calculator was online at the Enermax site XD

It could definitely be a PSU issue, or it could be your overclocked CPU which is going on 5-6 years old now. Try putting your CPU back to stock and see if that fixes it. That being said, running PSUs @ >80% capacity over extended periods of time is generally ill advised, if only for the noise and heat that they generate.

I only recently overclocked my CPU. I assume its the PSU because Overdrive dies a stresstest in the CPU overclocked and its fine and the restarts happen mostly while gaming when the radeon is rocking also. I thougfht with that system 500 brand watt would give me a big margin

Yeah 500W should be ample for that, and it seems to have enough amperage on the +12v rail(s) so no worries there.

Honestly, rather than going through all this conjecture, just start doing isolation testing... Lug your PC to a friend's place and throw his [higher wattage] PSU into your PC (takes about an hour to get yours out, his out, his in, test, his out, yours in, his in) to see if it suffers the same issue. If that fixes it, your PSU has an issue... if it still restarts, then it's another component

with the 4th core unlocked

THat unlocked 4th core was generally a roll of the dice, it caused a lot of instability.

so to step back slowly.
relock 4th core.
test
return to stock clock rates.
test.

Most of the time if your power supply have **** up once it will **** everytime.

Electronics component's don't like the absolute settings, and sometimes just below.