View Single Post - System Powers Off - Revisited

Blue|Fusion · Rated XXX

A few of you has helped me diagnose some issues with my sister's old Dell in the other trhead titled "System Powers Off." Well this time, my system seems to be doing it on occasion.

It first did it last week in my college dorm room. The system was updating, so there was alot of C compilation going on in the background. In the foreground, I was just surfing in Firefox. Out of nowhere, the system powered off. No warnings, beeps, or anything. Just went dead. I sat there stunned for a second. I then pressed the power button, however, nothing happened. I checked the plugs and all was good. I then decided to just glance in the side window. I saw that the green LED on the motherboard was still on, so there was power getting to it, so it wasn't the PSU, atleast I don't think. I tried the power button again to no success a few minutes later. Afte that, I cycled the power switch on the back of the PSU, waited a few seconds, and then tried the power button again. Booted up normally.

When it did go down, temps weren't any higher than usual for load on the P-D 840, plus, I figure it would throttle before it would actually kill the system.

Well, everything was going fine thereafter until today. I am recompiling all software on my system for some new CFLAGS to optimize the programs for the CPU. I was in about 100 of 430 packages after about two and a half hours of running at load temperatures. It was running while I was downstairs for most of the time. Just before it decided to die again, I was back in Firefox browsing while it was compiling in the background. I'm still not sure if Firefox has anything to do with it at all, but the only similarity between both accounts were that I was compiling and surfing in FF.

So here's what I did this time after the fact...
I had the system overclocked from 200MHz FSB to 214MHz FSB. All of the voltages were as low as they go in the BIOS with the exception of the PCI-E and the RAM which were at normal voltages. I ran memtest86+ several times through to ensure the overclocked RAM was working properly, and then I ran Prime95 stress test for several hours to make sure everything else was working well with the light overclock and undervoltage. No issues whatsoever.

I reduced the overclock to 210MHz on the FSB for now, but left the RAM timings as low as I can get them.

Anyway, does anyone have a good way to diagnose this and see if it's a problem with the PSU or overheating or what?

Thanks.