I've been experiencing instability with my system, and I'm beginning to suspect that the PSU is either faulty or under-provisioned. I'll get random crashes (reboots, more specifically), mostly when doing something intensive on the system like starting up a game. Looking at all the crash logs, I can't really find any errors that make sense to me. When the system goes down, all the lights & fans all die at the same time as the screen, then after a couple of seconds it comes back on and reboots.
I have a Corsair SF600 SFX PSU which is only 600W, and I'm powering a Ryzen 3700x, a AMD 5700XT GPU, a 1TB M.2 SSD, 32G ddr4 memory, 2 case fans, and a water-cooling pump. Plugging all of that into a calculator says that 600W is exactly enough, but is that right? Or could power-usage spikes be pushing things over the edge?
Edit: Sorry, CPU is a 3800X not 3700X. Just FYI
I've heard this in passing and haven't really been able to verify myself, but I gather that SFF PSUs are less resilient to transient power spikes (I.e. from GPUs), which can manifest as system instability under load.
There are several PSU tier lists floating around online (which I have also been meaning to consult for my own systems).
I've never heard this, but OP specified an SFX PSU, not just an SFF PSU. I can see that weakness being a thing for Flex PSUs, since they're often designed to fit in server racks or other tight spaces, but in all the time I've spent in SFF communities, I've never heard people complain about inferiority to ATX PSUs.
Would be curious if anyone knows anything definitive about this.
ah, I saw SFF in the model name and got mixed up. Reading comprehension fail on my part
Yeah I was kind of thinking that too, but I don't have evidence to back it up! Anyway, I'll look around and see if there are issues with this model