I reinstalled windows xp sp2 a few days ago and today my computer starting acting strange. Every so often it would (out of nowhere) turn off. No warning, no real reason, not your standard Windows crash/reboot, just turned completely off. It ran fine for a few hours and then did it again. Now I can hardly run the thing for two minutes before it dies. I thought it was an overheat issue so I checked the CPU temp in the bios and it's running between 45 and 55C. To be sure I had set fan speed and temperature warnings to ignore but the problem still persists. The two things of note I found were that I was getting a red warning indicator for the power supply fan, which would run at about 50% speed for a while then pick back up before dropping off again. Also the output of my PSU is registering 11.2 and 11.3V. Is this sufficient? It seems like the PSU might be dying but I'm not sure. It just seems odd that this all started happening after a format/reinstall.

System specs:
Win XP SP2
AMD Athlon 64 FX-51
2 Gigs RAM
Nvidia 6800 128 Meg
2 HDD, one with windows, one with games, music, documents, etc.

Any ideas most welcome.

Possible solution:

I asked myself what I could do to lower the demand on the power supply, so I unplugged my liquid cooling system. I never had it connected to my processor or hard drives or Mobo or anything - the system came with the PC when I bought it from my friend's tech shop. I've just had the thing circulating through, doing no cooling, just ignored. I figure after all that time the liquid must have started to congeal, or something got kinked becase unplugging the thing has so far allowed me to use my PC for...At least 3 minutes! (I made the previous post on another machine).

Now that I think about it I should have unplugged and thrown away the **** thing long ago. It has 3 fans and a pump and a few feet of tubing, and a few heavy (heavy in comparison to most computer components) cooling plates and a whopping great radiator.

Hello Launchbury,

Welcome to pchf.

Cooling in your PC of any kind is never a bad thing. But it sounds very likely that theres not enough power provided by your PSU in the first place!

Buy PC Bits.com Power Supplies & UPS Power Supplies & UPS

Those voltages do look a little low. How do they look after you unhooked the liquid cooling system?