PSU Blown?

[Arcane]

I'd been getting reduced performance in games lately, the odd freeze and restart etc. I put it down to the different drivers i'd been trying out and eventually reformatted yesterday to see if that would sort it out. Anyway, in the middle of a MW2 session today the PC shut down, no freeze or BSOD, it was as though it had been turned off at the wall.

I tried to switch it back on and the BIOS had reset itself, I reset it back and tried to restart it again. The DVD Drive clicked as if power where going to it, the fans spun for a couple of seconds and then it stopped again. I tried a couple of more times but it then wouldn't even spin the fans. The motherboard lights are on.

The PSU shows a red light on the back of it, i'm wondering if it's blown? I'd been getting a weird whistling kind of noise for the last few days but being lazy ignored it.

 

[ricky]

Which psu is it?

 

[Arcane]

Coolermaster Real PowerPro M850.

 

[RJC]

You can check the psu by linking pins 15 & 16 on the 24 pin atx connector, I would unplug all items and just plug a fan into one of the molex connectors.

Or do you have a spare you can check.

 

[Arcane]

I've not got a spare unfortunately, though the jumping the PSU sounds like a plan, I remember having to do it for leak testing water cooling, thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Arcane]

I took up RJC's suggestion and jump started the PSU with only a fan connected, it started up straight away. I then tried to restart again but no go. I disconnected everything but the cpu, ram and one of the video cards, again, dead.

At this point I decided to swap the ram into different slots, once I'd left only one module in the closest socket to the cpu it burst into life, kind of, the cpu fan spun and the ram LED lit up but still no video, any other module installed and it died again.

After resetting the BIOS and removing the battery I tried again and it went straight into POST. I reinstalled all the modules, SLI, sound card etc and after a windows recovery message it's been fine since. What i'm concerned about now is why it happened and how to find out, there's nothing in Reliability Monitor and nothing physical that I can point at?

My guess was the PSU, now I'm leaning towards the Motherboard.

 

[Arcane]

Last night, same issue. A BIOS reset, then a reload of the OC profile and it's fine again. I'm wondering now what the culprit is, PSU or Motherboard? The obvious culprit seems to be the motherboard, what I don't get is the machine's been running the same settings for 8 months issue free, nothing's been pushed voltage wise and once it's started it'll game for hours and pass 20 loops of vantage.

Any suggestions very welcome.

 

[matthab]

does it do it at stock?

 

[Arcane]

Good point, I'll give that a whirl, that'll at least rule out the OC.