Mobo sending excess power to peripherals while GPU is being used?

w0lvsauce · June 10, 2020

EDIT:

I'm an idiot. One of my PSU cables was loose. Not sure which but I reseated all of them on both ends and that seemed to solve the issue.

Hey all,

So today my PC started rebooting itself within a few minutes of any GPU intensive gaming that I was doing. I believe what's happening is whenever my GPU is drawing power, my mobo starts sending extra power to everything connected to it. First red flag was a few weeks ago during a gaming session with some friends. My USB mic started buzzing really bad out of nowhere. I changed ports and that seemed to solve it.

Fast forward to today, the same mic buzzing issue happens during games. I tried changing ports with no luck. Then my PC starts rebooting. This is what I was able to gather while troubleshooting:

My sound interface (PreSonus Studio 68) has an LED on it that changes to blue whenever it is connected to my PC. That light changed to a red while this was happening, meaning it is not in sync. I was still getting normal sound out of it oddly enough. It would start flashing in and out as though losing power during higher intensity games. This is obviously not normal behavior. The Studio 68 is connected via USB.
As I mentioned earlier, the USB mic would only buzz while gaming.
I managed to stop the reboots entirely by taking out a stick of ram. The LED on my Studio 68 still turned red, but it was no longer flashing in and out. This one I don't quite understand. We managed to game for a few hours without any hiccups.

I suspect something is getting too much voltage and the motherboard is resetting the PC as a fail safe. I'm not really sure if there's a way to test that. I've had this build for a few years now and the only thing I've changed out was the PSU about 6 months ago. All of my drivers are up to date and temps are all fine.

Specs are:

Ryzen 1800x

ASRock AB350M Pro4

MSI Duke 1070 TI

Dominator Platinum 3200mhz - two sticks of 8gb (clocked way down to 2133 because this setup does not like higher frequencies)

Seasonic Focus GX-650 80+ Gold

The PSU or mobo are my prime suspects. Unfortunately I don't have any spares to swap them out as a test. Has anyone ever had anything remotely similar to this? I did some searching on the web and there are a lot of similar issues with the buzzing, but nobody else had the rebooting issue.

Eigenvektor · June 10, 2020

3 minutes ago, w0lvsauce said:

I suspect something is getting too much voltage and the motherboard is resetting the PC as a fail safe. I'm not really sure if there's a way to test that. I've had this build for a few years now and the only thing I've changed out was the PSU about 6 months ago. All of my drivers are up to date and temps are all fine.

If the PSUs voltage on one of its rails is too high, it would be too high for all of the components attached to that rail. Components draw as much power (amps) as they need, neither the PSU nor the motherboard are able to "push" it.

My suspicion would be the exact opposite. The PSU might be faulty and isn't able to supply enough power to all components under load, which is why the system reboots. Which could be e.g. why components attached to USB start to fail, because they no longer get the 5V they need.

You could download HWMonitor. It can show you the voltages. The typical behavior is for voltage to go down as load goes up.

w0lvsauce · June 10, 2020

9 hours ago, Eigenvektor said:

If the PSUs voltage on one of its rails is too high, it would be too high for all of the components attached to that rail. Components draw as much power (amps) as they need, neither the PSU nor the motherboard are able to "push" it.

My suspicion would be the exact opposite. The PSU might be faulty and isn't able to supply enough power to all components under load, which is why the system reboots. Which could be e.g. why components attached to USB start to fail, because they no longer get the 5V they need.

You could download HWMonitor. It can show you the voltages. The typical behavior is for voltage to go down as load goes up.

Ahh, yeah that actually makes a lot more sense. I wasn't able to see anything off with the voltage on hwinfo. I ran FurMark GPU and CPU stress tests individually to see if the LED on my Studio 68 would start acting up. Sure enough it only started with both tests on, but not one or the other. I'll have to do some more testing and maybe see if I can borrow a friend's PSU to test out. Thank you!

EDIT:

I'm now seeing that the Focus brand of PSUs have some OCP issues on the pre 2018 models. I bought this PSU in 2017 as a back up and only started using it now, although it's strange it hasn't started acting up until lately. I guess that probably answers it!