How much power? Or what power supply?

[kevanf1]

A mate of mine has been having a problem with his PC. IT'll boot and run for so long but then resets itself. It has been running SuSE 9.2 and later 9.3 as well as Win XP. This behaviour can happen whichever OS is being used. A virus has been eliminated from the equation. I suspect it his power supply simply not being up to the task but a dodgy motherboard has also been put forward as a possibility. So, please can I have some opinions? This is the layout as far as I know.

Pentium 4 CPU (not sure of size but I suspect 1.7 or 1.

1 DVD drive

3 hard drives

1 GeForce graphics card (again, sorry I don't know size but suspect 5800)

1 Pinnacle 300i PCTV tuner card

mobo has onboard sound and 2 USB channels

6 fans in total comprising of 1 on the graphic card, 1 blower type fan (fits in a PCI slot) 1 on the CPU, 1 fan to cool the hard drives and 2 case fans

Here's the crunch. It's pulling its power from a 350 watt PSU. Is the PSU up to it? I think he ought to be looking at a 400 watt at least possibly 450 would be better.

Comments please

[Nigel]

Here's a good place to start...

http://www.jscustompcs.com/power_supply/

Depending on how much memory he has, and exactly which P4, 350W sounds like it is adequate - provided he isn't using his USB or Firewire ports to power any peripherals.

[nelz]

The quality of the PSU is more important than any alleged maximum output. The cheap PSUs usually supplied with computers or cases tend to brown out after a while, causing just this sort of problem. Stick with a good quality, branded power supply. I use an Enermax 350W PSU that has powered more than you list with no problems whatsoever.

[kevanf1]

Thanks guys. He does power a few USB peripherals but at the time I don't know what. Nelz, you could well be right about quality. After a nights sleep a couple more things have occurred to me. It could be a BIOS issue whereby his BIOS is shutting down the CPU when it gets to a certain temperature. Or it could be thermal creep. Whatever it is, this is going to be one of those real puzzlers. I think he is going to be trying a mate's motherboard sometime today as this other guy has the exact same mobo as he does. Very useful of course and not a luxury we all have access to.

If we get to the bottom of it I will post up what the solution is.

Again, thank you.

Kevan