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
Doesn’t appear to be psu, that model is pretty reliable and I’ve never had issues with it. And especially with your specs, that should be well within the power profile of the psu.
There’s a bunch of other strange things that can cause it. I would first check if everything is seated properly, especially if you use riser cables or extension cables. I’ve had a build that would have the display go black randomly, and the fans would start running at max speed, and the only way to return it to normal would be a full reboot. Turns out the riser cable was a bit loose and the problem goes away if you push the gpu firmly into the riser cable’s pcie port.
If that doesn’t work, I would also try reseating the RAM or CPU. I had another build that was prone to crashes at random, no idea why. Did all the regular troubleshooting things. I suspected it was a CPU issue, so I pulled out the CPU and plugged in my old CPU to test. When I put my new CPU back in, there were no issues anymore. I have no idea what I did differently, so it must have been that the CPU wasn’t seated correctly, or something like that.
Anyways, connections would be what I would check first. Pull out the pieces and then reseat them one by one and hope the problem goes away. If problem still persists, I would suspect it’s probably the riser cable. This might be a bit difficult with an SFF case, but try to mount the GPU directly onto the mobo, and see if the problem goes away. As I mentioned above, it might just be that the riser cable is a bit loose (so you might still be able to use it as long as you seat the GPU firmly), but it’s easier to troubleshoot if we can confirm that the riser cable is the problem
Interesting… I’ve used 2 different CPUs in this system over the years and the crashing has been across both - so it’s probably not that. I think I’ve also swapped ram at some point, but that’s easy so I’ll just re-seat it to bu sure. I don’t think I’ve ever touched the GPU so maybe re-seating it & the riser would help. Worth a try, at least. Thanks!