ok as you all know i just did a major upgrade to my system.....everything is running great, figured out all the memory and cpu settings.....thru in a new 7200rpm HD to replace a 5400rpm one that was in there.........havent hooked up the lights yet............stupid HD indicator light still wont work if i have the ide cable attached to the DVD rom, but works fine with a regular cd rom drive...........however tho here in my question.......last night while playing a game, twice in fact, my system just randomly restarted.....first time, i heard a clic, and the system went to reboot, and it hung up at the A7N8X post/slpash screen......pressed restart button, system ran fine.......played game again...bout an hour later, reboot, just this time it didnt hang up......i did notice that the first time the floppy light came on and wouldnt turn off, the second time i opened up my bay door, and the floppy light was on but it turned off like normal when the OS came up........i hate to admit it, but im running a generic 400w PSU in the system that came with the case....i was running mbm5 and i did notice the +3.3v line was reading like 3.0 give or take 10%....and the 12v line was dipping under 12 at points......the likely culperit the psu you think? im going to buy a anbtec truepower 430 tonite after work......but if you agree or disagree, ideas would be much appreciated =)

im pretty sure its the psu....common sense tells me so =)
but i like second opinions =)

Sounds like a heat issue to me.

might be ram timings also.

I had that happen to me, it turned out the mobo was shortin on the case.

BA thats what i thought too, but my system monitor that cam with the motherboard has a record feature, and my temps stay well below 50c, even below45c most of the time

It may not be a heat issue with your CPU, it may be your card. The reason I say this is you say you played for an hour and then it suddenly rebooted again. The first two times were also while you were gaming.

There is also a known problem with Geforce cards sometimes causing a random reboot, but drivers have pretty much cleared that up, and it was most common on Via chipsets. I would hope that nvidia would have not had this problem on their own chipset.

But it never hurts to have a good PS. I had a problem with my video once where the system would post but not boot into windows, ended up being the PS.

well the funny thing is, it only happened while playing that game....thats why im leaning towards the psu......i played ut2k3 for well over an hour with ducati and a few others last night and that is way more intensive then the other game.....the other game im refering to is asherons call 2.....

ok got the new psu in, and i am almost positive it was the problem, system powered up faster, and for some reason it doesnt seem like my system is sluggish any longer, everything is popping up at lighting speed like it did before i upgraded......i think that generic PSU i bought just couldnt hack the new power requirements, almost doubled the performance of everything in the system.....i could be just blowing smoke up my own ass, but i could see a change =)


EDIT: i just noticed all my lights in my tower are a helluva lot brighter now as well =)

if my video card is agp4x's and i have the agp 8x's support enabled in the bios could that cause a problem?



EDIT: UPDTE: Just had another frackin reboot while playin that dam game, gonna try something, the only real bios features that i have enabled on this board that i didnt have on my other is the 8x's support and on this board i left AGP fast write on.....i asked about fast write one time, and everyone had mixed results....i think this board dont like it =)....lets try and see

ok nevermind guys, i found out what the problem was......it wasnt any of my hardware at all....its the dam game, i talked to a tech support and the game has a mondo memory leak and if you have pixel shaders turned on in the game its like begging the game to wack directX all to hell and cause a reboot.......

well that lit the fire under my ass to go buy a real PSU for this system, i guess some good did come out of it......and itsa great releif off my shoulders that it wasnt anything on my end

thanks all those you gave me ideas =)