Dying Power Supply?

[Brennan Price]

Hello there, 

 

I require the help of people that may have had experience with something similar. 

 

Recently, I bought a used GTX 780, seems to be working, drivers work, display works and test benched it in MSI kombustor... But... As soon as I do anything intensive on it, it will freeze with the colour of whatever was being displayed on screen most. However, naturally, I wanted to test my new GPU after having found out it froze in kombustor. So, I fire up PUBG, it bricks up and freezes and nothing can be done, I had to hard shut down. 

 

The next time I turned on my PC, I get a bunch of white lines appear across my monitor. These lines go away whenever I move my mouse or do something, they come back soon after, I think the GPU has not been damaged in any way but the fact that less power is being given to it might cause this...?

 

I am not really sure what causes this but I know that until I put a load onto my PC, it's absolutely fine, therefore leading me to believe it is a power supply issue. 

 

My power supply is an Aerocool integrator 600W, this is the minimum required for a GTX 780, plus the amps on the 12v rail is 42a and should be fine, yet I still get this issue. Previously, before PUBG crashed I definitely thought that it's not drivers, but now I think otherwise due to these weird lines. 

 

Before I used my GTX 780 however, I used an HD 5850 1GB and I experienced weird things. In some games, the FPS would start off high and get lower until it hit an average of about 30 FPS, this number was dependent on the game though. This is what also leads me to believe its a power supply issue as I can't think of any other reason it would do this. 

 

Please, if anyone can help me or tell me what is going on then fire away. 

 

Thanks, BP. 

[Tusk2435]

4 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Hello there, 

 

I require the help of people that may have had experience with something similar. 

 

Recently, I bought a used GTX 780, seems to be working, drivers work, display works and test benched it in MSI kombustor... But... As soon as I do anything intensive on it, it will freeze with the colour of whatever was being displayed on screen most. However, naturally, I wanted to test my new GPU after having found out it froze in kombustor. So, I fire up PUBG, it bricks up and freezes and nothing can be done, I had to hard shut down. 

 

The next time I turned on my PC, I get a bunch of white lines appear across my monitor. These lines go away whenever I move my mouse or do something, they come back soon after, I think the GPU has not been damaged in any way but the fact that less power is being given to it might cause this...?

 

I am not really sure what causes this but I know that until I put a load onto my PC, it's absolutely fine, therefore leading me to believe it is a power supply issue. 

 

My power supply is an Aerocool integrator 600W, this is the minimum required for a GTX 780, plus the amps on the 12v rail is 42a and should be fine, yet I still get this issue. Previously, before PUBG crashed I definitely thought that it's not drivers, but now I think otherwise due to these weird lines. 

 

Before I used my GTX 780 however, I used an HD 5850 1GB and I experienced weird things. In some games, the FPS would start off high and get lower until it hit an average of about 30 FPS, this number was dependent on the game though. This is what also leads me to believe its a power supply issue as I can't think of any other reason it would do this. 

 

Please, if anyone can help me or tell me what is going on then fire away. 

 

Thanks, BP. 

The issues you have make me think of a GPU failure, moreso than a PSU failure, if not for the fact that you've had previous problems with another GPU. Can you use Afterburner to check graphs of GPU usage, clock, power, voltage, temp, mem frequency while hitting with a heavy load that gives you issues but does not crash?

[Brennan Price]

Just now, LionSpeck said:

The issues you have make me think of a GPU failure, moreso than a PSU failure, if not for the fact that you've had previous problems with another GPU. Can you use Afterburner to check graphs of GPU usage, clock, power, voltage, temp, mem frequency while hitting with a heavy load that gives you issues but does not crash?

No sorry, I'm at a stage now where windows tells me that the 780 is not working correctly and it gives me error code 43, however this is now either hardware or software, and I reckon its having these issues because the power supply is not outputting enough power. I don't want to install the drivers again as it might crash and corrupt it somehow. I get these white lines across it constantly now, they will still disappear if I move the mouse over them or move a window. 

 

I have tested it with another graphics card but only with ones that use much less power than the 780, so it's hard to say what's the issue... 

[Tusk2435]

5 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

No sorry, I'm at a stage now where windows tells me that the 780 is not working correctly and it gives me error code 43, however this is now either hardware or software, and I reckon its having these issues because the power supply is not outputting enough power. I don't want to install the drivers again as it might crash and corrupt it somehow. I get these white lines across it constantly now, they will still disappear if I move the mouse over them or move a window. 

 

I have tested it with another graphics card but only with ones that use much less power than the 780, so it's hard to say what's the issue... 

Can you try AIDA stress test on the CPU? Or some kind of CPU power intensive stress test, like Prime95 or OCCT? I'd try that to see if that kind of behavior (crashes, artifacts) is indeed related to the PSU's power delivery, as both CPU and GPUs take power from the 12V rail

[Brennan Price]

9 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

Can you try AIDA stress test on the CPU? Or some kind of CPU power intensive stress test, like Prime95 or OCCT? I'd try that to see if that kind of behavior (crashes, artifacts) is indeed related to the PSU's power delivery, as both CPU and GPUs take power from the 12V rail

I did think of that tbh... Thing is I really don't want to completely injure my components by having it brick up constantly etc... Then again, when I had the GPU on MSI kombustor, it seemed alright until I did other tasks in the background, therefore increasing the power needed for my CPU. 

 

It was only until I loaded up a game did it crash almost instantly. This makes sense to me as it was trying to deliver to both CPU and GPU and not one or the other. I still want to figure out if the lines are from the GPU now or if the poor power delivery is causing it... Yet I have no other PSU's above 600W that I could use, neither do any of my friends as far as I am aware... 

[Tusk2435]

2 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

I did think of that tbh... Thing is I really don't want to completely injure my components by having it brick up constantly etc... Then again, when I had the GPU on MSI kombustor, it seemed alright until I did other tasks in the background, therefore increasing the power needed for my CPU. 

 

It was only until I loaded up a game did it crash almost instantly. This makes sense to me as it was trying to deliver to both CPU and GPU and not one or the other. I still want to figure out if the lines are from the GPU now or if the poor power delivery is causing it... Yet I have no other PSU's above 600W that I could use, neither do any of my friends as far as I am aware... 

Ok, try this: within the BIOS underclock your CPU a fair bit, it doesn't really matter how much; you could actually just disable turbo boost. What's your CPU btw? Then, in Afterburner, put a -20% power limit on the GPU and check the behavior of the components to games, Kombustor and such

[Brennan Price]

1 minute ago, LionSpeck said:

Ok, try this: within the BIOS underclock your CPU a fair bit, it doesn't really matter how much; you could actually just disable turbo boost. What's your CPU btw? Then, in Afterburner, put a -20% power limit on the GPU and check the behavior of the components to games, Kombustor and such

OK I can try that in the morning, atm I'm getting ready for bed and wanted to kinda ask before I went to bed. I'll report back to you in the morning. 

 

My CPU is a Xeon X5675 and I have 8GB RAM paired with it. 1 SSD, 2 x hdds, a USB C expansion card and some LEDs. I have 5 fans in my case, I should think my 600w should be able to do this fine, even with a 780 but who knows eh. 

[Tusk2435]

6 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

OK I can try that in the morning, atm I'm getting ready for bed and wanted to kinda ask before I went to bed. I'll report back to you in the morning. 

 

My CPU is a Xeon X5675 and I have 8GB RAM paired with it. 1 SSD, 2 x hdds, a USB C expansion card and some LEDs. I have 5 fans in my case, I should think my 600w should be able to do this fine, even with a 780 but who knows eh. 

Sure, let me know how it goes and I'll reply as soon as I can! As for the peripherals and such you have you're correct, your PSU should be perfectly fine handling those, so I won't even ask you to disconnect some of those, because they probably wouldn't change the results. That Xeon tho!  95W TDP, I'm positive you'll see differences by trying to underpower both him and the GPU

[Brennan Price]

11 hours ago, LionSpeck said:

Sure, let me know how it goes and I'll reply as soon as I can! As for the peripherals and such you have you're correct, your PSU should be perfectly fine handling those, so I won't even ask you to disconnect some of those, because they probably wouldn't change the results. That Xeon tho!  95W TDP, I'm positive you'll see differences by trying to underpower both him and the GPU

Yeah I love my x58 Xeon haha. I've tried it, clocked my CPU down to 1200mhz and still no luck, I'm going to try booting with two PSU's now, one for the 780, one for the rest of the system. Hopefully it'll work.

[Tusk2435]

3 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Yeah I love my x58 Xeon haha. I've tried it, clocked my CPU down to 1200mhz and still no luck, I'm going to try booting with two PSU's now, one for the 780, one for the rest of the system. Hopefully it'll work.

Sure, try that; having two PSUs, you could also try replacing  one with the other or switching them when you're trying them both

[Brennan Price]

17 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

Sure, try that; having two PSUs, you could also try replacing  one with the other or switching them when you're trying them both

Yeah I'll do that too. Currently I have the secondary psu hooked up to the 780 with no luck on removing the white lines, however the drivers still won't appear. I'm installing the drivers again so they are there at least to see if that makes any difference. 

[Brennan Price]

31 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

Sure, try that; having two PSUs, you could also try replacing  one with the other or switching them when you're trying them both

Although using the two PSU's, and having no luck switching then round... I'm now testing my ram as it may be this that is causing the artifacts instead. In Windows, I still get error code 43 from the GPU in device manager...  ??

[Tusk2435]

13 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Although using the two PSU's, and having no luck switching then round... I'm now testing my ram as it may be this that is causing the artifacts instead. In Windows, I still get error code 43 from the GPU in device manager...  ??

Yeah, it could be a RAM issue too: to test it, I suggest Memtest86 or even the Memory diagnostic in Windows

28 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Yeah I'll do that too. Currently I have the secondary psu hooked up to the 780 with no luck on removing the white lines, however the drivers still won't appear. I'm installing the drivers again so they are there at least to see if that makes any difference. 

I expected the problem to change at least slightly by using two separate PSUs, but apparently either the problem isn't power correlated, or it's the PSU that powers the CPU that causes the problem

[Brennan Price]

6 hours ago, LionSpeck said:

Yeah, it could be a RAM issue too: to test it, I suggest Memtest86 or even the Memory diagnostic in Windows

I expected the problem to change at least slightly by using two separate PSUs, but apparently either the problem isn't power correlated, or it's the PSU that powers the CPU that causes the problem

Hiya, got my good ol HD 5850 back in my system with my 600W PSU. Everything seems to be fine, for the moment. I will however change my PSU very soon in the future which will probably be when I buy a more powerful GPU too. There were no RAM issues either so I can assume it must be the PSU still as some games still start off with high fps and it gets lower over time... Not sure if a 500W will be adequate for my system but its a decent psu at least as well. Who knows. 

[Tusk2435]

27 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Hiya, got my good ol HD 5850 back in my system with my 600W PSU. Everything seems to be fine, for the moment. I will however change my PSU very soon in the future which will probably be when I buy a more powerful GPU too. There were no RAM issues either so I can assume it must be the PSU still as some games still start off with high fps and it gets lower over time... Not sure if a 500W will be adequate for my system but its a decent psu at least as well. Who knows. 

I don't know what your CPU is, but generally speaking 500W is more than enough. As for the current temporary setup you have, can you stress test it to exclude the CPU as a possible cause of the issue? Just to be sure

[Brennan Price]

6 minutes ago, LionSpeck said:

I don't know what your CPU is, but generally speaking 500W is more than enough. As for the current temporary setup you have, can you stress test it to exclude the CPU as a possible cause of the issue? Just to be sure

Oh, I've stress tested my CPU and GPU multiple times on this PSU without any issues, it's just within games where the fps slowly drops. Also, before I go any further, I'd like to say I've already returned the GTX 780 and am currently awaiting refund so everything will be good. I also get paid on Tuesday so that is when I can probably buy a brand new GPU rather than buying used.

[Tusk2435]

1 minute ago, Brennan_Price said:

Oh, I've stress tested my CPU and GPU multiple times on this PSU without any issues, it's just within games where the fps slowly drops. Also, before I go any further, I'd like to say I've already returned the GTX 780 and am currently awaiting refund so everything will be good. I also get paid on Tuesday so that is when I can probably buy a brand new GPU rather than buying used.

Awesome! Glad I could help solving the problem 

[Brennan Price]

1 hour ago, LionSpeck said:

Awesome! Glad I could help solving the problem 

Aha yeah, thanks for the help, it's a shame I couldn't get anywhere with your suggested methods but it's given me an urge to buy brand new now, plus to get a much better power supply. I'll buy 80+ gold or platinum next time to go with something such as an RX 570 or GTX 1060. Cheers once again, I'm sure I'll let the forum know about my purchases very soon, I get paid on Tuesday so very soon haha