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

  • @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.