Thread: Power Supply Unit Issues

I'd like to know for sure if this is a PSU problem and not any other form of problem. I've had the Sapphire Radeon HD3850 AGP card for about a month now and its ran smoothly on XP for about a week or 2 but recently I've been getting lock-ups, VPU recovery, BSODs, random crashes, and multiple errors.

The first thing that popped into mind was drivers as the card is known for driver issues, So I tried many different drivers including Omega drivers and the problems still occur. I only know that my psu is a 500 Watt Coolmax with 2 +12 rails that add up to 34amps which should be plenty but, I've had it for a while now so I'd like to know if its the culprit for these suddenly random issues.

It will take a lot more trouble shooting to determine if it's the psu. Does your motherboard have onboard video that you can try? Do you know anybody with another AGP computer that you can try the video card in? It could be so many things like memory, or a virus.

Well its not a virus ive done many fresh installs, it’s not the video card it runs fine in another comp and no I’ve got an asus P4S800 motherboard so no onboard video.

If you tried the video card in another pc and it worked fine.

Borrow the power supply from that computer and see if yours works?

I have tried that but my rig is more of a power muncher then the other one as the rig i tried it in had 1DVD-RW 1HDD and 1 fan mines got 4 fans,2 HDDs,2 DVD-RWs the psu that i tried had only 29amps on the +12v rails so that would’ve been a no-go in my case.

The Crapmax 500 is labeled for 34 amps, labeled wattage shows just under 32 totals, and if it were capable of that I'd really be surprised.

If you tried a known good 29 amp psu (what is it?) and it didn't power up the system, your 32 amp Crapmax was never really enough.