TR Forums

In my latest build I decided to go for silence and low wattage. For my PSU I went with an EVGA 650w SuperNOVA w/ Platinum rating. The system has been up and running for about a month now but a new issue has appeared with in the last 3 days. The issue first happened when I plugged in my phone to a usb port and changed it from charge mode to media transfer mode on the phone. The second the change triggered there was a clicking noise form the computer and I found myself looking at the POST splash screen. It occurred two more times seemingly at random from inside the windows OS, once more when I simply plugged in the usb connector, once when waking it from sleep mode, and another time when I clicked a button to start downloading something. I was just about to wonder if my m.2 card was going bad when the machine started a string of restarts where it barely made it past post or even the initial fan check.

After I realized the issue wan't likely the OS or storage drive, I unplugged everything except for the HDMI cable but still had no luck getting past post at this point. Finally I removed the psu and flipped off the ECO mode and it booted right up. It has been up and running stable for 24 hours now but that doesn't mean I'm done ruling out other culprits. I still haven't tried hooking up the antenna coaxial cable to the capture card, and I haven't been actively on or in-front of the machine to see if it has restarted when I wasn't paying attention.

For those of you who don't know, EVGA eco mode is a setting that tells the PSU to cool itself passively when under a certain thermal load. I suspected this could create a lot of areas for problems to arise before buying the product which is in part why it was the first thing I turned off in troubleshooting. Not being a digital PSU I am not really sure how to self-monitor the temps to see if the fan isn't kicking in properly, or if perhaps something is just shorting out when it tries to switch between modes. Either way, I was hoping one of you could share if you had similar issues or experiences with this PSU or if perhaps you had similar issues as this and it wasn't the psu (for all I know its just a false negative and more issues are just waiting to happen).

EVGA 550 G2 owner here. I haven't had this problem, but I feel like the eco switch wouldn't/shouldn't be tied to anything but the fan controller. Makes me wonder if your eco mode isn't working properly and heat is building up and the PSU is shutting itself off before the fan comes on? I know the Superflower (2 series) models leave their fans off longer than the SeaSonic (S series) models, but either model should turn the fan on before temp shutoff occurs. AFAIK, the EVGA platinums are all P2, aka Superflower.

I had a problem with bad memory putting huge strain on the 3.3v rail. (Not even sure it was memory fault, rather the motherboard had bad firmware and was driving the memory incorrectly, got a firmware update for better DRAM handling recently) I did not notice until i was smelling burnt plastic and noticed side of PS was too hot to touch. The system was rock stable because my old PS was so overpowered for new system. Guess, it would have burnt down everything pretty soon.

The thermal sensors might not be positioned anywhere near the 3.3v and 5v rails and would not detect such a weird issue. Is your PS getting abnormally hot in one section?

"In my latest build I decided to go for silence and low wattage. For my PSU I went with an EVGA 650w "

Sorry I lolirl when I seen that. Guess I was expecting a 350W psu.

I just built a skylake system with an EVGA 550W G2, and one issue I had was when I enabled ErP in the BIOS, it wouldn't restart or boot.
I had to shut off the power supply for a couple seconds then it would boot, took a bit to figure out the issue, so just left ErP disabled.

blahsaysblah wrote:

I had a problem with bad memory putting huge strain on the 3.3v rail. (Not even sure it was memory fault, rather the motherboard had bad firmware and was driving the memory incorrectly, got a firmware update for better DRAM handling recently) I did not notice until i was smelling burnt plastic and noticed side of PS was too hot to touch. The system was rock stable because my old PS was so overpowered for new system. Guess, it would have burnt down everything pretty soon.

In order to put that kind of strain on the 3.3V rail the DIMMs would be close to melting. The DIMMs would fail long before the PSU in such a scenario.

just brew it! wrote:

blahsaysblah wrote:

I had a problem with bad memory putting huge strain on the 3.3v rail. (Not even sure it was memory fault, rather the motherboard had bad firmware and was driving the memory incorrectly, got a firmware update for better DRAM handling recently) I did not notice until i was smelling burnt plastic and noticed side of PS was too hot to touch. The system was rock stable because my old PS was so overpowered for new system. Guess, it would have burnt down everything pretty soon.

In order to put that kind of strain on the 3.3V rail the DIMMs would be close to melting. The DIMMs would fail long before the PSU in such a scenario.

Go figure, i went through two identical, brand new motherboards and two pairs of those identical DIMMs. Considering they came out with new firmware for mobo for DRAM, and memory was stable at 2133 but not at 2400(one pair sorta of worked, other pair made system squeel right away), they were driving the memory incorrectly. Which i think melted/shorted first pair. Because i could not shutdown my PC with them(had given up on 2400 by that time). Shutdown would get to turning everything off(fan spun down) and system would just come back up. I isolated to the DIMMs. Should have waited a year for Skylake and DDR4 to be more mainstream. Rock solid at 2133. Doing something wrong in the XMP profile. Mobo or RAM.

Im using same model mobo and RAM(though plain 2133 version) right now. Though new PS only for SFF reasons.

Yet another EVGA G2 550W owner here. I decided against eco mode pretty quickly because even at idle, heat would build up until it needed to run the fan (it would run for about 2 minutes every hour or so). It definitely did get a bit toasty in there with eco mode, but that alone shouldn't cause problems. That sounds to me like either there's some problem with the PSU itself that only manifests with a bit of heat buildup, or it's being put under some kind of abnormal stress that adds heat somewhere away from the thermal sensor(s). What's the system connected to it like? Blahsaysblah does have a point in that a heavy crossload (presumably from some other failing component) could theoretically cause the problems you're seeing. That would also make the correllation with peripherals make more sense. You might take a look at voltages on the various rails, especially 5V.

***UPDATE****

So one week after turning off eco mode the issue returned. I managed to take a video of the pc attempting to boot multiple times never getting past fan check. (waiting for photobucket upload and I will post into comment with edit). Still believing the issue to be the psu I swapped it out with my gaming PCs corsair 750 and the machine has been running steady ever since. I even ran PCMark on it just to put it through its paces after watching UFC 199 all night on the same machine. So far no issues. I then put the 650 into my other rig. I have since experienced two time where I hit the power button and all lights come on and then go immediately off and once more where it almost loaded windows before crashing. I have yet to see it crash once it gets into windows but I plan to run PCMark on this machine with the suspected bad psu and see if it can trigger a crash. The other behavior I am noticing since the switch is extremely high CPU temps. I took off the dust filter to look at my radiator and noticed only one fan spinning even though the pump and both fans run off of the same controller. The second fan on this controller is just twitching. Even the reservoirs back-light isn't on so I can't watch and see if there is any actual coolant flow(or just really slow flow). Right now the CPU is floating between 70c and 62c and the pc performance is terrible.

As a side note, my track record with evga is growing increasingly worse. My first evga product was a p55 ftw motherboard that wouldn't post if you ran memory in dual-channel config which inherently also meant it couldn't use 4 dimms at once. That was followed by a GTX960 the would bluescreen whenever running games in fullscreen mode on windows 10. This psu was going to be my last shot given to EVGA products but it looks like they struck out swinging on the third pitch.

Seems more like the MB or another part did something really naughty. The USB ports provide power at 5V. You were changing from 2.5/4.5 Watts(.5A/.9A, depending on USB2/3) to around 7.5/10 Watts. Btw, nothing new comes in to play. Only disallowing data transmission on data lines because more power draw causes too much interference in the USB cable.

There are too many shared elements before you get to the PS. Even so, even in PS, it all ends up in pretty much same place even though you see 50+ cables coming out of it. Much more likely your phone, USB cable, the USB port or the MB did something or >>>something was already bad and waiting for you to just breathe wrong.<<<

You sure system was not already overheating from bad fan controller? Turning off ECO mode just added some needed air flow into case.

edit: i am not saying a short or whatever bad power event did not happen on MB and possibly damage to your PS.

If it's any consolation, EVGA has arguably some of the best customer service in the business. I'm not sure how long you've had your PSU, but I'd recommend contacting them for a replacement if it's still under warranty (the 650 P2 has a 10 year warranty).

Good to know, thanks.