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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 11:26   #1
pablissimo
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Voltages and Shutdowns

I'm running a Shuttle SN41G2 with the following components therein:

ATI Radeon 9600
Two HDDs
A CD/RW
A wireless network card

Now, yesterday afternoon I ripped out the CD/RW and replaced it with a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, a cheapish Liteon effort that came highly recommended. PC was fine all of yesterday, was running flawlessly playing DVDs and the like well into the wee hours.

Turned it on this morning, and about 40 minutes later it suddenly shuts down in the same kind of way it would if someone had pulled the plug on it. 'Shit' he thinks, and investigates to see if it was thermal protection kicking in, but the proc's running nice and cool and the interior of the case isn't too bad, certainly no worse than normal.

I just now investigated the voltage readings MBM5 is giving me:
The 12v line is running at 10.9v
The 5v line is running at 3.23v

Would either of those seemingly crap numbers cause that kind of outage? The PSU in the Shuttles is only rated to 200W, but surely if there were going to be power issues I'd have encountered them last night and not today. Does a DVD/CD-RW combo take up that much more juice than a CD-RW?
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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 12:37   #2
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

Uhm...!
If I was to tell you the accepted tollerance on PSU voltage lines for stable operation is +/- 10% that should answer your question.

As to what has caused this, I'd be suspicious of blaming the DVD drive. True, it probably does take a little more power than your CDRW but not much.
Whatever is going on there's a severe problem with your PSU - it's either overloaded or is just dieing. 200W is maybe a little low for that system but it should be OK (you haven't mentioned what CPU it is, another major factor).

You can try plugging your CDRW back in if you like. If that fixes it then I'd say there's something wrong with the DVD drive, like an internal short or something. It should not be doing that to your power lines, and even if it was drawing a lot more power that should only be when it's actually running.

Check around the case very carefully to see you haven't dropped a screw or something in and shorted across a component somewhere.
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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 12:53   #3
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

I'd say the PSU is dying, I wouldn't directly blame it on the drive. Unplug it and see what happens.
Also note that the more power is drawn at startup, when all drives are spun up than when the system is idle. So unless it only crashes when you run a heavy application (a game for example) I'd say that the PSU is rotten rather than too light.
The voltages are worrying though. Better too low than too high ofcourse but I'd get it fixed. When the PSU is bad there is a chance it might give spikes to other precious hardware.

PSU's are silly things. I'm just finished replacing mine. I was at a LAN yesterday, and after a minute or 10 it simply shut down. I started it again, and it went down after a few minutes again. After a few times it didn't even get past the pre-boot screen. It was just giving pulses to the drives (trying to spin-up) but didn't succeed. So that was enough for me to suspect the PSU was dead.

I don't know how well you know computers but replacing a PSU is quite simple really. I had never done it before but it took me less than 10 minutes to take the old one out and put the other one in.
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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 18:18   #4
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

Right, there's been 'a development'.

Shortly after making that post, my PC turned itself off again. '**** this' I thought, 'I'll put it back to the way it was and order a new, more powerful PSU'. Disconnected the power to the combo drive and turned it back on.

Distaster.

One of the drives was taking ages to detect, and couldn't be booted from. I thought I'd fried the drive, which would have sucked but everything important's backed up so no big panic, but just to check I tried each component in turn. Turns out that I can no longer run the two hard drives at the same time, irrespective of whether or not the combo is in the system. I can run either hdd and the combo, and it boots fine (so hdd isn't fried after all), but as soon as I try hooking up the two hdds one fails (always the same drive). Tried them on different IDE cables, on the same cable, every combination.

It's pretty inexplicable. Though another interesting issue is that now, with only one hdd and the combo hooked up, the 5v line is running at 3.17v. Regardless, I'm buying a new PSU right now, 250w instead of the 200 that's in it and I'll see if it fixes things, but I am at a total loss as to why suddenly, after two years of perfect operation, the two drives no longer want to play ball.

Also, as a result of all this bollocks, the system clock is precisely three hours fast. Where's that confused smiley?
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Last edited by pablissimo; 18 Sep 2004 at 18:24.
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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 19:28   #5
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

Right, a 250w power supply and a 250gig hdd have been ordered so at least I can replace the two conflicting drives with one bigger one, but I wouldn't mind some theories as to why I can't run the drives together any more. Surely you can't 'sortof' damage a power supply?
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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 22:05   #6
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

The thing people tend to forget is that components don't last forever.
PSUs are generally rated with a MTBF (mean time before failure) in thousands of hours. However, the important word there is the first one: mean.
For a mean to exist there have to be variations - it looks to me like you were unlucky and got one of the variations on the lower side. I don't think you've done anything to break the PSU, it's just had its day.

As to your harddrives, there is certainly nothing wrong with either of those, they're just acting as would be expected when trying to cope with voltages that are 36% out of range - thats 31% further out of range than the ATX standard dictates (I was wrong earlier, it's +/- 5%, not 10%).
Your 12v line is what is used to drive the HD spindles, and always tends to deviate more than the lower ones in any system, so the chances of it being anywhere within accepted limits are practicly non-existant in this case. Its also highly likely the current output has plummeted if the PSU is fried, so you'll be lacking in amps as well.
To use the old electricity = water analogy, your pressure is way too low (voltage) and the volume of water being moved is probably too low as well (current (amps)). If your PC was a hydro-electric dam, the lights would be going off all over town

I don't think this can be blamed on the DVD drive either really. It may have drawn a little extra power that pushed things "over the edge" but by the looks of things your PSU was just waiting to bite the dust anyway.

I'd say you've just been plain unlucky. You probably would have had no issues with a replacement 200w one, but I think you've done the sensible thing in getting a 250w - after all, it gives you room to upgrade later (faster PSU or better graphics card would both take significantly more power).
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Unread 18 Sep 2004, 22:11   #7
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

I was surprised that I've managed to load this much on such a small PSU anyway, but my wee box hasn't had a complaint since recently. In fairness it's been running probably 50% constantly for the past two years so it's not much of a surprise that something's gone pop.

I treated myself to a 200gig hdd alongside that new PSU to show me how much I love me.
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Unread 20 Sep 2004, 00:44   #8
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

Power Supply Units are the most skimpted on component on a PC install. The problem is you have a Small Form Factor PC, this makes things like this difficult to upgrade. I hope you have fun replacing ti
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Unread 20 Sep 2004, 00:51   #9
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

I've already found a replacement, it's on order. It's actually a power supply from the updated version of my box, a Silent-X power supply which not only is 50w more powerful but has a better controlled fan system. Or so I'm told.
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Unread 22 Sep 2004, 13:17   #10
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

SilenX (if thats who you mean?) are indeed good for quiet, reliable PSUs.
I wouldn't say their fan control is anything revolutionary (it's a simple linear scale, whereas more advanced ones use an exponential ramp) but what they do have is an extraordinarily quiet fan to compensate.
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Unread 22 Sep 2004, 17:01   #11
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Re: Voltages and Shutdowns

It's a Shuttle-made PSU entitled 'Silent-X' I believe, I don't know whether the two are related.

New PSU went in the other day and everything was fine, the 5v line is still very low at 3.15v, but the 12v is pretty close to a 5% tolerance at 11.37v (a little over 5% low). Has seemed stable so far but I'll have to keep an eye on it, got MBM doing voltage recordings every 5 seconds and logging them so I can see what goes down if it ****s itself again, though in fairness I don't have any old benchmarks for my 5 and 12v lines so can't tell how different they are now to when the box was new.
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