"PSU's cant cause freezes"

[Liborio]

Hi all,

 

I was told "PSU's cant cause freezes". Basically advised a PSU either works or doesnt work, nothing in between. If the PC fires up and runs, PSU is fine. If it doesnt start at all, PSU is gone. Nothing in between that. Im not sure what to think of that? Whether this is true or not? 

 

Can a PSU really cause freezing randomly on the odd occasion if it has some fault? Or not?

 

Interested to hear what people think & their views on this.

[PopsicleHustler]

PSU can cause freezing if there is voltage jumps. There are 3 main voltage rails: 12v  5v and 3.3v. If you have low quality PSU, it can go above and below given voltages. Its also known as "Voltage ripple" which can cause instabilities and freeze your system..

[mariushm]

tldr: with modern power supply from reputable manufacturers and which have certifications and are based on modern designs, typically it either works or doesn't.

 

long version...

 

No, it's not quite true.

 

For example, there are components in a power supply that can change their performance (and their technical properties) with heat. 

 

For example, a component may behave as expected in a power supply when it starts up and it's cold, but as the power supply heats up, the technical properties of that component can change slightly (you could say "drift" from normal specifications) and go outside a range that the designer of the power supply accounted for.

A good engineer knows that over time, due to regular use, a particular component may degrade from let's say 100% to 95%, so engineer designs product to work with that component even when that component goes down to 90% of its original specifications/quality.

Well, it could just happen that a component is at 92-95% of this fictional level when cold, but as it heats up its quality level could drop below 90%

 

Such a bad component could cause the output voltage to fluctuate or have "hiccups" that last for very short duration, like glitches, and such "events" could cause some components to reset or freeze, and then if the computer wasn't programmed to account for these sudden "resets" the whole computer could freeze.

 

A power supply outputs several voltages: 12v , 5v , 3.3v and 5v stand-by. There's also -12v but that's barely used, it's not worth talking about it.

 

In some rare cases and with some designs of power supplies, it's possible that if a component suddenly takes a lot of energy from one voltage, the other voltage could be affected. For example, you may have a video card that suddenly consumes 200 watts (for example let's say you're in a game, you pause the game to go in menu, then unpause) and the 5v voltage of this lousy power supply could lower to 4.5v for a very brief time until the power supply can "recover" but that sudden drop from 5v to 4.5v could cause some components to not handle it well.

 

In other situations, the power supply's electronics can degrade in such a way that instead of 5v, you'll get 5v with a lot of "ripple", basically instead of smooth 5v, you could have a voltage that thousands a time a second, it oscillates between 4.5v and 5.5v or some voltages around 5v.

Chips inside your computer that expect to be powered by 5v are designed with some safety margins and tolerate some amount of fluctuation, but in some rare cases, these chips can just "give up" and get stuck or reset themselves due to bad power quality.

 

Also... a common failure in cheaper power supplies... the 5v stand-by is a voltage that's produced 24/7 by the power supply, even when your computer is shut down. This voltage is used to power the motherboard's chipset and some components, depending on what you select in bios (for example, the network card could be powered, so that you could turn on your computer remotely if you wish).

 

Because the power supply is otherwise turned off, the fan doesn't spin, so this tiny 5v stand-by "mini power supply" in your power supply relies on just the air around it to stay cool, so often the components that form this mini power supply degrade much faster than the regular power supply, which is kept cool by fans and big heatsinks.

In time, this 5v stand-by power supply can degrade in such a way that the output voltage starts to fluctuate around 5v so much that it can barely power the motherboard when the computer is turned off.. and as soon as you turn on the computer and the chipset starts to turn on various components in your computer and do its job... naturally it needs more power to do these things compared to when PC is simply turned off.  So this brief sudden demand from chipset for more power can be enough for this degraded 5v stand-by power supply to give up or give too low voltage and cause the computer to reset because the chipset resets.

In such cases, you may see computer restarting several times when you try to power on the PC (not to be confused with situations when the computer intentionally restarts itself several times when you install new parts and start for the first time - the bios sometimes "learns" how to work best with components this way, and needs to restart pc a few times for that purpose)

 

 

Freezing in general is rare ... more often you will simply see computer shut down or reset itself.

[Liborio]

 

6 minutes ago, PopsicleHustler said:

PSU can cause freezing if there is voltage jumps. There are 3 main voltage rails: 12v  5v and 3.3v. If you have low quality PSU, it can go above and below given voltages. Its also known as "Voltage ripple" which can cause instabilities and freeze your system..

 

3 minutes ago, mariushm said:

long version...

 

No, it's not quite true.

Thank you both very much, super informative. 

 

The reason i ask is because i randomly have my PC completely freeze on me forcing me to force restart (no matter how long i wait for it), sometimes with a high pitched noise (once or twice), usually when playing games but has happened when doing simple web browsing or document work. I have run every hardware test possible, reinstalled windows on a brand new SSD, drivers all up to date etc. To only find one thing....OCCT application advising 1 error during a PSU test (https://imgur.com/a/otkfcdV)

 

Although, OCCT doesnt advise what the error is........ So maybe im thinking this is where my problem lies? Perhaps a new PSU will eliminate my issue? I have been struggling to identify (over the last 2 years), where my problem lies?

 

My build:
CPU - Intel Core i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
MOBO - ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming
RAM - G Skill RipJaws V 16GB DDR4
GPU - MSI 980Ti Sea Hawk Edition
PSU - Seasonic 850W 80PlusBronze ATX

Cooling:
CPU - Corsair H80i GT
GPU - Corsair HG10 N980

[DezGalbie]

People don't generally seem to appreciate the number of issues which faulty or downright broken PSUs can cause. It seems like people who don't know what they are talking about often assume that "PSU supplying current = PSU fine" and "PSU not supplying any current = PSU broken".

I know a smidge more than these people, but still not enough to explain it all.

But yeah, as already mentioned, PSUs can cause systems to freeze. But resets, BSODs etc are more likely to occur when a PSU is playing up.

[mariushm]

1 minute ago, Liborio said:

Thank you both very much, super informative. 

 

The reason i ask is because i randomly have my PC completely freeze on me forcing me to force restart (no matter how long i wait for it), sometimes with a high pitched noise (once or twice), usually when playing games but has happened when doing simple web browsing or document work. I have run every hardware test possible, reinstalled windows on a brand new SSD, drivers all up to date etc. To only find one thing....OCCT application advising 1 error during a PSU test (https://imgur.com/a/otkfcdV)

 

Seasonic is a good manufacturer, makes good power supplies. I doubt it's the power supply that it's a problem.

 

However, it wouldn't hurt to test, especially as changing the power supply won't force you to reinstall anything or won't alter your system in any way. As your system seems to have issues even when outside games, you could test even with a cheap power supply (as long as you don't go into games, the 980ti is quite power hungry, consuming up to around 250w when you game)

 

Such freezes can happen when a device no longer replies to commands from the cpu, for example a video card plugged in the pci-e slot receives a command and cpu gets stuck waiting for a reply... you hear the sound frozen as the sound card repeats the last sound it had in its tiny buffer, because the system no longer fills the buffer with new data.

It could happen due to a faulty usb controller which again may make the cpu get stuck in an endless loop... I've seen it happen once or twice while trying to recover data from some dying mechanical drives (read heads were failing and refusing to move, sata controller would receive bad data from hard drive and freeze and so on)

 

So it could be anything, like an incompatibility between your video card and motherboard, it could usb related, but I don't deny it could be also power supply related.

[Liborio]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

I don't deny it could be also power supply related.

 

2 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

PSUs can cause systems to freeze

Thank you both greatly. As i have mentioned i have done many, many tests to eliminate both hardware and software faults, and have only been able to identify that one PSU error.

 

A bit stuck at this point and may have to replace the PSU as i have no other ideas. Hopefully it resolves the issue.

[Guest]

Buy a new PSU.

 

[Fasauceome]

2 hours ago, mariushm said:

Seasonic is a good manufacturer, makes good power supplies.

They also make bad power supplies, every PSU manufacturer has bad units in their lineup.

[Liborio]

Thank you all.

 

I will try a new PSU and hope for the best.

[Fasauceome]

8 hours ago, Liborio said:

Thank you all.

 

I will try a new PSU and hope for the best.

I'd love to see if a new PSU solves the problem, it'll be the first case I've seen of it. Keep us updated. What PSU are you going with?

[xreaperx22]

lol if jonnyguru says buy a new one....you better just do it!!

[pas008]

3 hours ago, fasauceome said:

I'd love to see if a new PSU solves the problem, it'll be the first case I've seen of it. Keep us updated. What PSU are you going with?

my seasonic x1250 had 12v rail issues dropping in the 10.5 range

keep making it freeze randomly 

took pics on aida64 bios and hwinfo stating it for rma

 

got  version xm2 with different cables back

[Liborio]

On 6/14/2019 at 10:19 PM, fasauceome said:

I'd love to see if a new PSU solves the problem, it'll be the first case I've seen of it. Keep us updated. What PSU are you going with?

Well im not quite sure yet. That'll be my next search. Most likely start a thread to get some guidance from more experienced users as im not sure about the specifics of replacing it.

[Liborio]

Hi all,

 

These are reading from HWMonitor after a few hours of running. Do these voltages/power readings looks odd? Or anything else for that matter?

 

Thank you.

 

[OrionFOTL]

5 hours ago, Liborio said:

Hi all,

 

These are reading from HWMonitor after a few hours of running. Do these voltages/power readings looks odd? Or anything else for that matter?

 

Thank you.

 

We can't tell, because software cannot measure PSU voltages. If you want to measure output voltages, you have to use a digital multi-meter.

 

By the way, it doesn't matter if you measure voltages "after a few hours of running", or after 5 minutes of running - right now they're both idle. Only the load at the time of measuring counts, however you were loading it before measuring doesn't really matter.

[Alan G]

I had a Seasonic G360 that was powering my HTPC fail when it went out of spec with the Power Good signal.  It was erratic and sometimes would not come out of sleep because the signal was bad.  The PSU was only a couple of months outside the three year warranty so I simply swapped in a new PSU and haven't had any issues since. 

[Liborio]

Thanks all. I guess ill have to start the process of elimination and hope its either the PSU or MOBO.

[Fasauceome]

Just now, Liborio said:

Thanks all. I guess ill have to start the process of elimination and hope its either the PSU or MOBO.

Since you're basically already slated for a PSU upgrade, might as well eliminate that as a factor.

[Liborio]

1 minute ago, fasauceome said:

Since you're basically already slated for a PSU upgrade, might as well eliminate that as a factor.

Couldnt agree more. It's had its fair run, time for an upgrade anyway i believe. Now to find out what to replace it with that would be just a simple straight swap out. Will gladly take suggestions as im not very familiar......

[Fasauceome]

Just now, Liborio said:

Couldnt agree more. It's had its fair run, time for an upgrade anyway i believe. Now to find out what to replace it with that would be just a simple straight swap out. Will gladly take suggestions as im not very familiar......

Anything from the good ol Corsair CX to their TXM or even RMX does the job and then some, or if you're good with the non modular path, the Bitfenix Formula Gold. Check out the PSU tier list by clicking the PSU in my signature for a good list. 

[Liborio]

4 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

Anything from the good ol Corsair CX to their TXM or even RMX does the job and then some, or if you're good with the non modular path, the Bitfenix Formula Gold. Check out the PSU tier list by clicking the PSU in my signature for a good list. 

I was leaning towards a fully modular ATX 750W Thermaltake 80+ Gold....Thoughts?

[Fasauceome]

7 minutes ago, Liborio said:

I was leaning towards a fully modular ATX 750W Thermaltake 80+ Gold....Thoughts?

750 watts is way more than you need, 650 watts for a high end rig is plenty. Thermaltake has both good and bad units, and 80+ gold doesn't really bring anything special to the table either. Grab a unit with decent quality.

[Liborio]

2 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

750 watts is way more than you need, 650 watts for a high end rig is plenty. Thermaltake has both good and bad units, and 80+ gold doesn't really bring anything special to the table either. Grab a unit with decent quality.

Thanks for the info. I notice my build would be happy with 600-650 after viewing hardware monitors and seeing how much power my hardware actually requires. Which makes me think, why are there crazy PSU's with like 1000+W's? Whats the point if all these rigs would happily run off no more than 700? 

[Fasauceome]

15 minutes ago, Liborio said:

Thanks for the info. I notice my build would be happy with 600-650 after viewing hardware monitors and seeing how much power my hardware actually requires. Which makes me think, why are there crazy PSU's with like 1000+W's? Whats the point if all these rigs would happily run off no more than 700? 

Some combination of overestimating how much the parts draw, bragging rights, and wanting the ability for multi GPU in the future,  but none of those are too compelling for the average user.