New hardware : Crash/Reboot on Win 7 WEI test and games

Hi,


My motherboard recently died and since most components of my pc were already five and a half years old, I decided to transfer my HDD, PSU, RAM and DVD RW to a new case, and install a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card and some more (identical) RAM.


I discovered this forum while browsing for a solution to access my old win 7 so I could update my drivers and get my motherboard to recognize my HDD's partitions correctly, and used Kaktussoft tutorial on Paragon Adaptive Restore to get past that problem.


(Thank you very much Kaktussoft.)


Getting rid of old drivers and installing the new ones was easy enough. Then, I thoroughly installed every important windows update that was checked. They gave me a bit more trouble as one or two installations failed, but I simply installed less updates at the same time and that seemed to do the trick.


Unfortunately, I still have a far more unpleasant problem : during Windows experience index tests and when I try to play games, the computer suddenly reboot (no BSOD before reboot, the fiability monitor only logs an unexpected stop from windows and the computer runs fine when he's not asked anything strenuous).


I managed to pass the WEI test after several try. As my case was open at the time, I first suspected high temperature on my CPU to be an issue. I checked it with HWMonitor, and it reported alarmingly high temperatures, but I quickly discovered that apparently it was only misinterpreting my AMD CPU thermal margin, which I checked with AMD Overdrive : it seemed to be fine, the CPU having at least a 40°c margin just before a crash occurred.


Having browsed the web for answers, most of the messages I found talked either about overheating (as I said, apparently, everything is fine), outdated or wrong drivers (mine were downloaded two days ago from the constructors websites after erasing those from my old hardware) and finally, faulty or underpowered PSU.


Yikes. If this is my problem, I will have to spend another 50 euros for a new one to get my computer to work properly, which I can if it is necessary but it still represents quite a sum for me, especially after spending so much on new hardware. Besides, my PSU is 680W which is supposed to be plenty enough and never seemed to give me any trouble before.


I am not really tech savvy, be it about hardware or software. I have some empirical knowledge but mostly, I search the internet for posts about similar problems and use the answers to try and solve mine. I did not select my hardware, nor assembled this computer alone, but the friend that helped me lives in another city and can't be expected to come see me to solve this before at least several days if not more, and I don't even know if I can get my hands on another PSU powerful enough to check directly if it is the cause of my problem.


Can someone please help me to ascertain what causes those crash/reboot (and hopefully point me towards a solution) ?


My configuration :


CPU : AMD A8 7600 (using stock fan) [NEW]

Mobo : ASRock FM2A88X Extreme4+ [NEW]

Graphics : Radeon R9 380 2GB by XFX [NEW]

RAM : Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600mhz (4x4gb : yeah I know, they sell it as 1600mhz, but it only is 1333mhz) [2 NEW and 2 Old]

PSU : Mad-X Magma 680W [Old]

1 DVD RW [Old]

1 HDD [Old]

No computer case fan.

Thank you very much for your answer ICIT2LOL.

I got lucky yesterday and got in touch with another friend with a powerful enough PSU to test if those reboot were caused by my old Mad-X. We hooked my computer on his PSU a few hours ago and played a couple of games on high settings, for half an hour, and everything ran fine.

Since with my old PSU, thoose games couldn't even be played even for 5 minutes, we concluded that it was dying a slow death (or simply that it never was a 680W PSU in the first place, since Mad-X seems to have a bad rep).

I ordered a new (and hopefully more reliable) PSU from a website with a buyer-friendly return policy... worst case scenario : the new PSU doesn't solve my problem and I will just send it back, or more probably keep it for later use as I can't expect my old PSU to live forever.

I'll make sure to check the tutorials you just mentioned if the same problem shows up again, but for now I would rather avoid plugging in the old PSU, just in case it malfunction and fries my motherboard.

I'll return in a couple of weeks to mark that thread as solved if I don't encounter any new problems.

Problem Solved : it was the PSU.

Unfortunately I also have random freezes. I tried fixing them for more than a week before asking for help in this thread. Thanks for the help ICIT2LOL.