Power Problems

In January I built a rackmount PC that runs 24X7 for the Major Geeks Folding Team. I used an AMD 64 3700, an ASUS K8N-8 Deluxe, 3 Ultra 512M RAM, 1 Floppy, 1 Sony DVD RW, 1 PNY GeForce FX5500, and a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 160GB IDE HD. The OS is XP Pro and I have three case fans. ASUS Probe shows the CPU is running at 107 F and all the voltages are within specs. It boots and runs fine except since January it has eaten two 400 watt PSUs and three 550 watt PSUs. It is currently on number four 550 watt PSU.

I thought the issue might be the power supplied to the PC since I live in a very rural area and the power has many spikes so I installed a surge protector - no help. I recently put the PC on an UPS and to my surprise the new UPS indicates it has less than one minute of backup power for this machine. I put my regular desktop that runs an AMD 64 XA 4400, 4 512M RAM, 2 DVD Drives, 4 250GB SATA HDs, 6 case fans, and many other things on the same UPS and it indicates 9 minutes of backup power.

It seems the rackmount draws a lot of power, much more than it should. I am looking for suggestions on how to isolate what is drawing all the power. I just started removing items and testing them in another PC. Does anyone have a better idea?

 

Just a thought after reading that you have gone through those PSU .. How come the fuse aint blowing in the Units??? as I assume thats what they are there for to stop any overload. And I take it you have looked in Task Manager/Processes to see if and what is running high, Also have you looked in your Event Viewer in Component Services in Admin Tools.

 

After the third PSU, I dissected a failed unit and found that one of the Mag Amps had over heated and cooked the insulation. The last few units that failed did the same thing. I could smell them before they went bad. Each unit has worked for about two to three weeks before they fail. I have reviewed the event logs and there is nothing there to suggest what is drawing all the current. The only application running on the PC is the Folding program. It is 99% of the load. I just ordered a $100 600 watt PSU with a three year warranty. That should handle the load until I ID the component. I think it may be the motherboard or processor since everything else came for other systems that worked fine.