I am going to try to upgrade my power supply to see if that is what is causing the reboots.

Any advice on power supplies to purchase or avoid? I'm currently using a 500 watt Antec.

My computer is a dual socket G34 AMD Opteron "Magny Cours" 2x8 CPU (total of 16 cores) at 2gHz.

PCI/PCIe cards are: nVidia 560ti (1gb RAM), SIIG (TI chipset) firewire card, Creative X-Fi titanium sound card, Echoaudio MIA midi sound card, VIA 5 port USB 2.0 card.

I have two 2 terabyte 7200 RPM hard drives in RAID 1, one is a Seagate the other is a WD.

Thanks kind folks,

Peter

Really? Nobody at all?

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

I'd use the above to check what kind of power you're likely to need, and then go for one of these:

http://www.seasonicusa.com/NEW_X-series_560-660-760-850.htm

I've the 560W version. It's a modular PSU, and with the following in my PC:

AMD Phenom II x 6 CPU
4 x 4GB DDR3 RAM sticks
3 x Crucial M4 256GB SSDs
1 x Samsung F3 1TB hard disk
1 x ATI HD 3450 dual dvi gfx
1 x Roland Octacapture USB 2.0 soundcard
1 x system fan, silent model.
1 x OCZ Vendetta 2 CPU cooler.

The fan works 80% of the time, if not more, in silent mode. See the link in the above for a description.

Others recommend other manufacturers, that are great PSUs also. For me, this the best I've used on my own and other builds.

Edited by il Padrino (30/11/12 09:40 PM)

Do you know the model number of the board?

You might need 2 X 8 pins for the board which are not standard on all PSUs, but i'm not sure without knowing what that board is.

I'd also point towards Seasonic, Enermax and the current generation of BeQuiets as the places to start looking for a new PSU... that said the Antecs ain't bad if you've been happy enough with the last one.

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Thanks for your response,

I bought a Corsair 850 watt power supply, unfortunately, this didn't solve my problem of the computer spontaneously rebooting if I plug in any USB device. I do have a workaround, if I plug in the USB device(s) I need before powering up the computer everything works fine.

Any idea what might be causing this? Should I try to get a new dual socket G34 motherboard?

My current motherboard is an Asus KGPE-D16.

Thanks,

Peter

Edited by twotoedsloth (04/12/12 07:08 PM)

It sounds like the case is live and your causing it to short out when you plug in a usb connector.

However that doesn't make much sense as you only tend to see that if someone builds it incorrectly and going off the components, this doesn't exactly sound like a new build.

Does this happen on all the USB ports or just the front ones?

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

You're correct, it is not a new build. It's about a year and half old, and the spontaneous reboots just started a couple of weeks ago. And yes, it does happen when using the rear USB ports both on directly on the motherboard and the breakout cable (plugs into the motherboard and uses a rear card slot, but is not plugged into the PIKE slot that uses that slot).

Sounds odd for it to just start occuring but in keeping with my previous thoughts if something was shorting against the case but not unheard of. I saw a few case a few months ago where the on button had a frayed connector and it made the whole case live enough that the USB problem your seeing was happening.

Have you been inside to change or clean anything around the time period when it started? That might give us somewhere to start at.

What I'd do at this point but it's not the quickest test is lift the motherboard out and place it on a bench with a psu hooked up (your old one will do) hook up the bare basic keyboard/mouse/video and a boot drive, head into windows and see if you can replicate the resetting issue with it on the bench. That at least would rule in/out something being live case wise.

The only other place I'd look really for these symptoms would be the psu but you've already taken care of that.

--------------------
ScanProAudio & 3XS Audio Systems
ScanProAudio Blog

Thanks so much for your input on this.

This is probably stupid, but yes, I did put a USB 2.0 PCIe card in a few weeks ago when my USB hub stopped working properly. I thought that an internal card would be more stable than a hub. I'll take it out again... actually I should probably take out all of the cards except video (duh) and see if that solves it.

Again, my thanks.