I’ve been experiencing instability with my system, and I’m beginning to suspect that the PSU is either faulty or under-provisioned. I’ll get random crashes (reboots, more specifically), mostly when doing something intensive on the system like starting up a game. Looking at all the crash logs, I can’t really find any errors that make sense to me. When the system goes down, all the lights & fans all die at the same time as the screen, then after a couple of seconds it comes back on and reboots.

I have a Corsair SF600 SFX PSU which is only 600W, and I’m powering a Ryzen 3700x, a AMD 5700XT GPU, a 1TB M.2 SSD, 32G ddr4 memory, 2 case fans, and a water-cooling pump. Plugging all of that into a calculator says that 600W is exactly enough, but is that right? Or could power-usage spikes be pushing things over the edge?

Edit: Sorry, CPU is a 3800X not 3700X. Just FYI

  • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble
    4•9 months ago

    Try limiting the speeds of your CPU then the GPU and see if the crashing still happens. If you drop the CPU speed and it goes away then something is with your CPU (or memory). If dropping just the GPU stops it then it’s probably the GPU. If you have to drop both and then it’s stable, or dropping either CPU or GPU then it could be the power supply.

    • @nopersonalspaceOP
      2•9 months ago

      Interesting, it’s a bit hard to test as the crashes are super un-reproducable. (I don’t think I’ve ever been able to produce a crash with a synthetic benchmark or the like). Any recommendations for testing? Or do I just have to run the system for a while in each state and keep track myself?

      • @fuckwit_mcbumcrumble
        1•9 months ago

        It could be the spike in loads that’s causing problems. I tried googling for transient spikes since Nvidia is notorious for it but AMD is better. But they pointed out this.

        https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/ixvlf8/anyone_experiencing_5700_xt_instability_may_want/

        Also SFX PSUs tend to not have as much capacitance on the output side which could be part of the problem. A higher wattage PSU might not fix the problem, but it could help. But a higher quality one should definitely fix it assuming it’s a PSU problem.

        Try running some synthetic tests first for a while and see if it’s stable. I think my PSU is dying from the spikes in load from my 4090. But that’s a 4090.