18
That forum guy who told me to check the PSU rails was right
About 3 weeks back my shop PC kept hard crashing under load, no BSOD, just black screen. I was ready to blame the GPU since it's a used 3060 I snagged cheap. Some random commenter said to multimeter the 12V rail before buying anything, and sure enough it dipped to 11.4V under stress. Swapped in a spare 650W Corsair I had lying around and it's been rock solid since. Anyone else had a gut call get overruled by a cheap test that saved you cash?
2 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In2 Comments
evant4829d ago
Huh, but a multimeter tests the PSU under load, not the rails themselves.
3
abby30828d ago
Oh wait, @evant48, I gotta jump in here. A multimeter actually tests the voltage on the rails directly, not under load. You set it to DC volts, poke the 24-pin connector, and read what's coming out of the yellow and black wires. The load part is what a PSU tester does, or you'd use a dummy load resistor. Otherwise you're just getting idle readings, which can look fine even if the PSU is dying under stress. So you're kinda half right, but the multimeter is still a solid tool for checking rail health, just not the whole story.
5