PSU Problem?

[Legion2005]

Alright... Ive upgraded my system a bit. Here the parts I used to have.

AMD Athlon XP 2700+ (333MHz FSB)
1GB PC-2700
Asus A7V8X-X
30 Gig hard drive (quantom fireball)
80 Gig hard drive (seagate)
DVD Reader
CD Burner
2 80mm fans
2 92mm fans
Vantec Aeroflow
1 120 mm fan

Ive upgraded to whats in my sig...

I have a 300 Watt Enlight powersupply. I know this is underrated for my stuff, and I am planning on buying a fortron 500w.

My problem is I want to know if this could be causing one of my games to freeze. This game is sacred, and is known to have a few bugs. Ive never had it completely crash my system like this before though. This all started happening when I took out my 30 gig quantom, dvd reader, cd burner, and put in a dvd burner. I also got a saitek gaming keyboard which has backlighting.

My 12v rail is the only one that is low... its running at approx 11.394 at lowest and 11.649 at highest. Could this be COMPLETELY locking my computer?

*Edit* Oh yeah... I have another really crappy PSU running my fans and lights right now. That just made my 12v rail go more unstable. The lowest peak is what it used to be, but the highest peak is about .15 more.

 

[Codeine]

Your PSU has nothing to do with crashing your video game. It would simply crash your monitor or CDROM. Video games are always crashing.

 

[AND_YOU_ARE]

I have a differnt thought than Codeine's. I had a 400w psu in my system with the following pieces of hardware (see my sig) and it was crashing in every game with high quality graphics. It would crash while playing HL2, CSS, BF1942DC, but wouldnt when playing AoE or CS. So what I did to test it was unplug everything that wasnt neccessary. All I had running was the sound card, video card, one hard drive, one optical drive and as little fans as I could. I was able to play BF1942DC for three hours with out a problem. When before I was only able to get 10-15 minutes of game play before it froze. So I bought a 550w antec psu, and havent had any problems since then.

So first go in your case and unplug everything that in not completely necessary and see if you are having problems. Then go out and get yoru self a good 500w psu with high voltage rails.

 

[grego]

I agree that it is also probably the PSU. 11.39v is really low.

If you really want a high quality PSU check out the January issue of Maximum PC. They torture tested 9 diferent PSUs. It really seperated the men from the boys, so to speak. For example, the new shiny chrome looking PSU with the detachable modular cords (X-connect something I think) got a 3/10 because, well, it sucks. There's a few really quality PSU's in there too.