I’ve been having odd trouble for a while with my gaming PC. It’s a 2.67 GHz Core2Quad with 4GB RAM and an NVIDIA GTX 280. The odd thing was that sometimes, when I would turn it on, the power supply would make an extremely loud and scary BANG noise, usually followed by the machine’s power going off. Then the power would come back on and all would be well. This happened about once a month and didn’t seem to do any harm, but made me very nervous when turning the machine on. The power supply in question was a 650W model made by Antec, so it should have been great and never failed. I figured it was perhaps just a dust bunny arcing or something, but in any case, I knew that something eventually had to be done.
I had another power supply in a machine I never use, so I thought I would liberate that and replace the Antec one. The replacement is a shiny chrome-plated blue LED 750 watt unit from some apparently off brand called HEC (I bought it because it was relatively inexpensive and seemed like a good deal). After unravelling a lot of spaghetti wiring, I got the old PS out and the new one in, and the machine booted up fine (I also took this opportunity to replace my old Sony DVD writer that grows rather attached to disks and won’t eject them if they’ve been in for more than a few minutes).
I though all was well, but I was wrong. I started up Lord of the Rings Online and played for a bit when suddenly the screen went black. I saw the formerly green “got enough power” light on my GTX 280 was now red, so the video card shut down. I tried switching PCIe connectors and other things, but the PSU starts making noises when GPU-intensive programs run and the graphics card shuts down after a few minutes.
So I guess that machine is out of commission for games until the new Corsair PSU I just ordered from Newegg arrives next week. Darn…