power supply monitoring?

[doo]

I'm having a bunch of difficulty figuring out what's going on with my civ4. Most of the time, I get a hard crash/reboot. Once in a while, I get a blue screen. I have tried many of the fixes posted here, but I'm starting to wonder if it is my power supply. At one point, someone had mentioned the power supply and I thought that wasn't it since I have Asus PCProbe on my computer and the temps and voltages didn't seem to be fluctuating, but I'm not entirely convinced that PCProbe is giving me accurate info. Now that I think about it, I am still using the generic 300w power supply that came with the case when I built this computer back in the day (even though I have upgraded several components, including moving to an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro).

So, my question to everybody is: Does anybody know of a cheap (preferably free) utility to monitor power supply voltages/peak loads? Or are the only solutions hardware based?

 

[sg13]

I used to have many lockups and sudden reboots, but after I replaced my supposed-to-be 450W power supply with a new 480W quality one, all my problems went away.
I too have AIW radeon 9800 pro and an asus mobo.
The problem with the old power supply was that it didn't supply a steady voltage to the cpu. if your pc probe doesn't show a steady line (or near steady) in the various voltage meters, then mybe it's time to replace it.

Anothe note you should consider:
Most new graphics card need a seperate power suplly, so maybe your 300W one is probably not enough.

Sam

 

[Zanmato]

Great, looking at my ASUS monitor it looks like I need to replace my 300W PSU. Got wavey lines in the voltage meter. I'm thinking of upgrading the video card too, perhaps upto 6600 or 6800. My FX5200 can't handle everything these days. Will 450W be enough and will I need to change any of the jumpers on the Mobo? Already lost a 512Mb stick of RAM due to a power loss/spike.... with only 512mb left the system too slow to play Civ4.

 

[doo]

sg, I was looking at an Antec SmartPower 500 Watt that is on sale at CompUSA. But since you are having success with yours, would you mind telling me what kind you are using now?

 

[doo]

if the power supply is failing, would it get hot first? I'm not sure how the auto-protect feature works. Do they switch off due to Temp or do they switch off due to power load? Or both for that matter?

I ask b/c i opened my computer and have been manually monitoring the temp of my power supply at crashes (read: using my hand to see how hot it is), and it is usually pretty cool.