Power Supply Woes
1560 days agoI think that one of my PC’s Power Supply is about to give out. However, I am not very sure whether it is actually the power supply or it’s the graphics card. You see, sometimes when I play games like Civilization IV or Heros V, the entire PC will hang or freeze mid-game. But when I do other stuff like surfing, doing word or excel or even just some programming, nothing happens. It doesn’t crash. Only when I am playing games, the crashing occurs. Naturally, you would think that it’s the graphics card. Why? Because games makes most use of the graphics processor and when it get overloaded it crashes. This could be due to overheating. But then, I switch my graphics card to another PC, every game I played works! I mean I tried playing for hours and hours, but it just doesn’t crash. I the switch the card back to the inital PC, it crashes again. Goodness, it seem to be cursed!
So I decided to test part by part. Taking off the RAM, swapping RAM and even stripping every non-essential component but it still crashes. So I nearly gave up but finally decided to swap power supply. Lo and behold, it doesn’t crash all. Both the power supplies are the same model and type, so it shouldn’t be the wattage that is causing the crash. And it has been working along fine all these while. So there you have it, it was the power supply causing the crashes. I was told by the graphics card distributor that a lot of problems were actually caused by faulty power supplies. It becomes unstable as the graphic card draws more power from the power supply and the voltage and current fluctuates. Luckily, I was about to format my PC and see whether the clean PC crashes or not to confirm it’s the hardware not that software.
Too bad, my power supply is not longer in warranty. Need to fork out some cash to pay for a good quality power supply. I am thinking of getting Acbel whose prices are pretty reasonable and from what I have read on the Internet, they are quite reliable. And their local distributor has one of the most top-notch service in Singapore, something which is very rare here indeed. Actually in my opinion, manufacturers should carefully pick and choose their local distributors as it matters a lot to their customers. Everyone hates a crappy distributor who doesn’t provide any after-sales service like what most distributors in Singapore are.
