I can't figure out what's wrong with my computer's power

[megahertz]

So I've recently upgraded a computer I built a year ago. The only parts I upgraded were the motherboard, processor, and RAM. It's been running fine on Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS, and I've been running a Minecraft server off of it.
My laptop recently died (for God knows what reason), so this has brought up the necessity for Windows 7 on my "server" (for video games). However, today the computer beeped after Windows started up. No specific sequence, just seemed to beep for no reason. One beep. It beeped again about 10 minutes later. My computer has been restarting for windows updates, and it seems to beep after windows starts, although sometimes it doesn't. It just seems random to me.

Worried, I checked HW Monitor. I noticed something off about the voltages:

CPU Vcore: 1.01 V
3.3V: 3.33V
5V: 3.20V
12V: 14.08V

That doesn't seem right to me, so I checked the motherboards hardware monitor, it showed:

CPU Vcore: 1.400V
3.3V: 3.312-3.328V
5V: 5.016V
12V: 12.056V

I'm a bit new to the building computers scene, so maybe I got something wrong? Or maybe Windows is messing up my voltages? I'm not sure and I don't want anything to go wrong with this computer, since my laptop just died.

Here's my build:

AMD Phenom II X4 955BE Deneb 3.2GHz 125W HDZ955FBGMBOX
MSI 870S-G46 AM3 AMD 870
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) Model F3-12800CL9D-8GBRL
GIGABYTE GV-N95TOC-1GI GeForce 9500 GT
COOLER MASTER ELITE 335 RC-335-KKN1-GP Black SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower
Antec EarthWatts EA650 650W
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3750528AS 750GB
Seagate Barracuda ST3250823AS 250GB
Seagate Barracude ST3160212SCE 160GB

Let me know if there is any more info that could be useful.

EDIT: I justed checked the board's memory compatibility, and apparently the RAM I bought isn't on it therefore wasn't tested/supported. Would this effect the 12v and 5v readings?

 

[hunter315]

Its not uncommon for software to read voltage wrong, BIOS is one of the more accurate ways to check the voltages, but even that has a decent margin of error, the only really accurate way to check the voltages is with a digital voltage meter; however, some deductive reasoning can help us prove BIOS to be significantly more right than HW monitor in this case.


Your 12V rail supplies power to pretty much anything with a motor in your case, as well as your CPU and GPU, if you were at 14V any fan that is hooked directly to the PSU would be spinning much faster than designed and would have killed itself. You also would have pretty well cooked your board by now, 12.056 V in BIOS seems much more plausible than 14 V since you dont smell anything burning.


If you search through these forums you will find many cases where HW monitor took a guess at what the voltage was and missed, i have seen it show 8V for the 12V rail or even a small negative number, both of these are obviously wrong as the system could not boot on that.


Your ram is very unlikely to affect your power supply and i dont think your power supply is having an issue anyway. If you are still concerned go pick up a digital multimeter and check, the allowed range is +/- 5% of nominal value for the 12, 5, and 3.3V rails.

 

[megahertz]

Excellent. Thanks for the response. I figured the BIOS would be the correct one.

The beeping still occurs, but I'm not as worried about it now. I'm hoping an error will present itself so I can properly troubleshoot it.