So my computer has been rebooting automatically for quite some time. Usually it occurred when it’s playing a video, so I thought either the graphics card or the drivers for it were problematic, but even after upgrading the drivers and switching in a working nVidia GeForce MX420, the system still rebooted by itself.<\/p>\n
I then slowly unplugged one thing after another, finally literally leaving just the RAM, CPU and motherboard and the boot drive. I had ran memtest for over 6 hours with no problems found. I even did a full scan disk and no bad sectors were found. I started to think I have a faulty motherboard or cpu. Although the symptoms I’ve been seeing looked really familiar to what happens when the motherboard detects a system is overheating. However, looking at the temperatures in the BIOS showed that everything was pretty normal, even immediately after a reboot.<\/p>\n
The motherboard manual had recommended a 300W power supply and it seemed fine with mye 350W PSU, but I even installed a new SuperFlower 450W PSU and the problem was still there.<\/p>\n
So the new motherboard I got was a ECS P4M800PRO-M V2.0 which had a power connector I have never seen before. Instead of 20 pins, it had 24 pins. I thought that was odd and started reading through the manual and it turns out that although there’s a 24 pin power connector port, it said can support either 20 or 24pin power connectors. According to my research, ATX refers to the 20 pin power connector and ATX 12V refers to the 24 pin power connector. Many power supplies has what is known as the 20+4 pin power connector which supports both ATX and ATX 12V, which basically means it has a detachable 4 pin on the power connector.<\/p>\n
When I had tried to search online in regards to problems with this motherboard, there were many threads saying this motherboard was problematic with 20 pin power connectors. So I decided to get a 24 pin power supply to see if that’ll help. I dropped by Fry’s and started looking at their power supplies. The parking lot was quite a mess. It was the day after Christmas sale and I had to wait 4x at the traffic light before I even got into their parking lot. You know it’s crazy when they have Fry’s people at the entrance directing traffic and forcing you to loop around the back. Still wasn’t as bad as the Black Friday sale I went to a few years back.<\/p>\n
However, it appears that most people were there to return stuff. The checkout line was actually only half filled. The other day when I went there to pick up my cpu\/motherboard combo, the parking lot was half filled, but the checkout line was completely packed.<\/p>\n
I was going to drop $75 on this Antec SmartPower 2.0 450W Power Supply<\/a>, but ended up picking up a Ultra V Series 500W Power Supply<\/a> for $60 instead. To my surprise, there was a $40 rebate on top of it, making it only $20 after rebate. However, it appears that their online website has it for FREE after rebate, but I don’t really have much time left around here so, $20 for the convenience was worth it.<\/p>\n After installing this new power supply, my computer hasn’t rebooted by itself yet, and things seem to be normal. Let’s hope I didn’t jinx it and it continues to run w\/o any problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So my computer has been rebooting automatically for quite some time. Usually it occurred when it’s playing a video, so I thought either the graphics card or the drivers for it were problematic, but even after upgrading the drivers and switching in a working nVidia GeForce MX420, the system still rebooted by itself. I then … <\/p>\n