PC Problem

[DJSmith3000]

Hi there, I have just been building my new PC and I think it may be over heating, but I am still not 100 percent. Occasionally, it will crash with the blue screen of death, and or just reboot, also the graphics card fails, and I get fuzzy green and pink dots everywhere. These problems have only occured since I put the new graphics card in a few days ago.
These are the PC Specs:
AMD Phenom x6
Sapphire Radeon 6790
450W PSU
ASROCK N68C-s UCC
4 Gig of Ram

A temporary fix I have come up with, was to take the side of the pc off, and put a fan beside it and this has shaved off 10 degrees and seems to have postponed the problem. This is leading me to believe it is overheating, if this is the case, would it be possible for me to install more fans with my current PSU? Or have I simply got the wrong end of the stick.
Cheers

 

[treefrog07]

Some people use front to back airflow, others use bottom to top, still others use a combination of both.

You should be able to add another fan or 2, they don't draw much power. See if you can fit 120mm fans or larger. If your case has 4 or more 5.5" bays, you could put a 120mm fan in the space using 3 of the bays, leaving one bay available for an optical drive. You motherboard likely has fan power connections (usually 3-pin for fans other than the CPU_FAN)

 

[boiler1990]

I'm voting for heat issues - a case with good airflow would not respond that drastically to opening the panel and blowing a fan into it.

What model of 6790 are you running, and what case is in?

You need to make sure your airflow is efficient and intuitive. For example, it doesn't make sense to have all fans blowing into the case or out of the case, because there's no circulation. What you want is some sort of natural flow from front to back, back to front, or bottom to top.

When I had an Antec 300, I had 2 fans in the front and a side fan pulling into the case and the top and rear fans pushing out of the case. That way the air would flow to the upper rear of the case (my CPU cooler kind of messed up the airflow). The side fan helped my GPU, because it pulled air into the GPU cooler and exhausted out the rear.

 

[Raiddinn]

I have seen a crazy cooling setup with a top mount PSU upside down drawing in from above the computer and pushing out the back combined with a fan just under that in the back that pulled air in and the air was pushed out the front above the CD drive.

I never saw anything like that before, but I guess that is how they roll in Germany. I never would have believed it if the guy didn't show me it in person with all the OCing and everything.

Anyway, what really matters is that the whole setup makes sense.

Traditionally that has meant bottom front intake and top rear exhaust, that is not the only viable setup, though.

What case do you have?

If you want to learn enough about PC cooling to be able to answer these questions largely on your own, look over these links

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cooling-airflow-heatsink,3053.html

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cooling-air-pressure-heatsink,3058.html

 

[tsnor]

"This is leading me to believe it is overheating" Please measure and post your temps. There are many programs that give temps from MB, CPU, DISKS, VIDEO, etc. I like realtemp (google it).

Sapphire Radeon 6790 -- I've seen power consumption reported up to 150 watts for this card. (http://icrontic.com/article/sapphire-radeon-hd-6790-review). If overclocked power goes up quite a bit higher than that. The rest of your parts should need another 150 watts when pushed (AMD Phenom x6 TDP = 125). Overclocking that adds a ton of power requirement too.

You have a 450W PSU, which should be enough if the PSU is any good. If the PSU is a weak generic then the FAN effect may be mostly cooling your PSU enabling it to give you the last bit of current you need. Cheap PSU output drops like a rock when they get hot.

As a test, use AMD's overdrive in your video driver (google it) to UNDERCLOCK your 6790. This will cut current draw in your PC. Does it stabilize ? (If you are overclocking your x6 CPU stop that also.)

Also, there were some memory fails described that sounded similar to this where the default memory timings were not correctly picked up by the BIOS. Manually setting the memory to whatever voltage/timings the memory requried fixed those issue. gl.