Is my powersupply toast?

I have a P4 3.0 Ghz with 2gig ram,and four hard drives and a dvd burner. I have an Enspire 450 W PSU...which I imagine is tapped out with all the hard drives (3 are IDE and one is a 500 gig sata. I also have two extra cooling fans installed.

As of yesterday, she won'tboot....after splash screen..I get "overclocking failed".

I thought maybe heat also,but let it sit over night and still the same issue.

What size of power supply should I move upto? If thats the prob...

 

Seems like PSU failure.

which part have you overclocked and how much?

 

to be honest...I wasn't even aware that the unit was overclocking...must have been some suto setting that I overlooked when putting the machine together.

I am looking at moving up to a Enermax ELT620, a 620 W unit, to be sure to cover all power requirements, but will be a while till can scratch the $200 together.

Will be re-applying thermal paste to the cpu fan as well..

would the "old" power supply be fried or just not adequate (only about a year old), I just added the SATA 500 a few weeks ago, so maybe it was just too much for the psu to supply adequately.

 

It sounds like a setting problem, not a psu problem. If your unit is fried it would do funky stuff but not put words on the screen. if you can boot to bios, I would say go in and enable restore factory settings, if not, then I would say pull the cmos jumper and reset the bios go back in and set your date and time. If all of this fails start looking for another problem. If you are that concerned about the psu being over taxed drop a few drives for the moment, I have a 450 watt psu running my system, and I have a 3.0 Ghz P4, 4 case fans, 2 opticals, 2 80's in a raid array, a floppy, a massive card reader, and its still ticking along.

 

Would it be a simple heat issue...although I had let it sit off overnight and came down in morning and it still came up with the overclocking failed message. I had thought system files might have been corrupted, so stuck the windows cd in a did a repair, but unfortunately it shut down before could finish that action so now the system files are in rough shape...will still boot from cd so maybe will try to reset the bios and then run that repair again.

 

Was looking at a Ultra X Finity 600 W unit for possible replacement...is this a good psu?

 

Before spending the money check it out first. Make sure it is your PSU. it sounds like an overclocking/overheating problem to me. not the PSU. have you tried reseting the cmos jumper/removing the onboard battery? These will reset the bios to factory specs and could get you started. The problem was not the OS as in your other post you never even get to the OS. Now don't play with the repair disk until you get the computer stable, or else you could end up losing all of your data if you haven't already. The problem is if you end up spending $75-$200 on a new PSU and that wasn't the problem, now you have a spare PSU, and a still cooked computer.

 

the thing I don't get tho...is how can it get overheated right off the hop? It was off all night, come down in the morning and turn it on...and get that overclocking error. Unless, some flag was thrown the night before when it shut off.

Is that why you suggest resetting the cmos settings? To get around any flags that might be set by the overheating from the previous time?

 

A processor that is drastically overclocked, or under cooled can overheat and trip out on thermal overload in seconds. I ran into a problem with a brand new 775 2.8 that would run for 15 seconds and shut down, I looked around and found one of the heatsink clips wasn't propperly configured, I repaired it and its running along at a stable 45 degrees.

 

I went to get some thermal goop to re apply to my heatsink and seen a new case that had a few more built in fans than my cheapo case has and more rooms for air to circulate...it has a 450 W psu also....so hopefully between re-applying the thermal goop and blowing out all dust from heatsink fins...resetting cmos and new better circulated case, it will be better. There is a big hdd cage in it as well so can space out my hdd's, that will help alot as well. Its got a bunch of fancy lights and stuff, which I never really cared about..but whatever lol

The cpu must have some auto over clocking feature, for I know that I never set it to do that. Will maybe look into it once its up and going again...

 

Thanks for all the pointers guys! Turns out, I indeed only needed to re-install cpu heatsink with new application of thermal goop. But I also went ahead and got a new case because it had several more built in fans (grandaughter loves all the lights on it...lol) I dug out the manual for my board (P4P800 SE) and reset the cmos. Had to put my windows disc in to re-do the repair I started the other day, for it shut down in the middle of it.

The new tower I got had a 450 W PSU in it, but it did not have the SATA power cables that my old one had (Inspire 450 W), so thankfully it is still good.