Symptoms of low power PSU

[Pyramus]

What are the symptoms of running a system with an underpowered PSU?

I'm wondering if you get BSODs or not mainly.

 

[Grenage]

When you say underpowered do you mean voltage wise or Mhz wise ? - it ust wont work if it's Volts, but Mhz it would just run slowly.

 

[Pyramus]

wattage. ie. using a 250W instead of a 300/350W.

 

[Grenage]

I have never come across it before no. Normally BSOD is down to overheating on the CPU, memory problems etc. These are you primary suspects.

 

[paparazi]

Usual lockups, restarts and general instability.
Usually happens when there is a demand put on the PSU say a CDrom starting to spin up etc.
Also you can sometimes audibly hear the heatsink fan/ power supply fan change tone as it slows down when a hard drive or some other device kicks in. Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.

 

[Grenage]

strange, do you know your computers specs ?

 

[candyman6807]

I have to agree with paparazi the usual lockups, restarts and general instability, are some hint or maybe you PSU is dieing or the fan is not cooling enough.
Usually 2 hard drive and 2 cd-ROMs on a 250W is more the enough in a regular use.

 

[Pyramus]

How about 2 hard drives, 2 CD roms, an athlon XP 2000+ and a GeForce4 on 250W?

 

[DBSSP]

Read my Quote! Good God Man! That's just a smidge more than that power supply can handle. Jay

"Jeezus-sqeezits Bob!"

 

[paparazi]

You have done well so far but a PSU failure can often take out other hardware so my advice would be to change it before it blows taking that nice GF4 or moby.
350 watter should be OK, AMD recommended if you can afford it. Martin Just trying to help, sometimes falling short, I am only human after all.