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Is your power supply causing the weird problems on your pc?

Until I saw this happen, I would never have guessed.

My co-workers gaming rig started acting really, really odd after he installed his new ATI Radeon 3850 a couple weeks ago. The install went fine, he grabbed the latest Catalyst drivers from the AMD/ATI site and loaded them, and rebooted…and then things got weird.

The first thing he noticed was his Windows desktop falling apart – a thin, black horizontal band here or there, the corner of an old window embedded on his desktop long after the app had been closed. Not really a HUGE concern to him, the system was still working and he hadn’t experienced anything terrible like a blue screen or system freeze at this point.

So he fired up Crysis to take it for a spin with his upgrade GPU. The game would load, then crash and dump him back to his desktop a few moments later. Then it quit loading all together. Hmm.

He launched CS. And played, with no glitches for quite a while. Then he noticed certain textures bleeding – for example, a board that he could walk on looked longer than he knew it should be, and he fell off when he tried to walk on the phantom part of it.

Truly messed up, but still not something that would cause me to look at his PSU. We tried the card, swapping in a 3870. We tried the RAM, popping in a Patriot low-latency dual channel kit. We even swapped his Q6600 for an E8400. Nothing!

We hooked up a new SATA driver and did a clean install. Things looked god at work, I even had Crysis running with no problem. He took it home, and it went for a crap again. Could his 600w CoolerMaster be the problem?

He brought it in one last time and we popped an 850w Antec in and sent him home. Badabing, no more errors! Lesson learned.

To help you avoid this, I suggest checking out Thermaltake’s new PSU calculator to see if your system has enough horsepower to handle the upgrade you want to do to it. It could save you some headaches!

Tags: power supply, problems, psu, reboot   Posted in Hardware