Possible capacitor plague - need help identifying
- by cornjuliox
I've been having some PC power issues lately, and I think I've tracked it down to a bad power supply. Lately, when I'm on my PC it will often restart without warning, displaying "Hypertransport sync flood error occurred last boot." once POST finishes. I've googled the error, but can't come to a definitive conclusion as to what's causing it. I've seen posts suggesting that it might be a power supply issue, but nothing conclusive.
Here's what I've done so far:
-I haven't installed anything suspect within the last 3 months.
-I do overclock just a tiny bit, so I tried raising the voltages a little. That didn't work so I brought both CPU multiplier and voltages all back to their default settings, but that didn't solve the problem either.
The problem still occurs.
-AV scanned the whole system, nothing suspect.
-I suspected that it might be a bad power supply so I cracked that open and found
the following:
I think it might be cap plague, but I'm not sure. It looks more like glue TBH. Could someone help me figure out what might be wrong with this PC?
EDIT: Sometimes, after these restarts, I noticed that the GPU fan doesn't spin up, and the single rear case fan that just happens to be connected to the same molex Y-cable as the GFX card doesn't spin up either. Anything to that?
EDIT 2: I do use the system quite heavily, but I don't know how that will factor into this. I often play Diablo 3 and EVE Online at the same time, frequently alt-tabbing between the two. I also have Firefox open in the background, sometimes with several tabs, and if I feel like it, I'll mute the in-game sound and open foobar2000 for better music. Could it be that I'm just pushing this thing too hard?
EDIT 3: I also noticed something odd. Right before I experience these restarts, my monitor would suffer from very faint lines of static moving across the screen. The monitor is still very much useable, but it is very annoying. Following the restart it disappears, and then would gradually re-appear over the next few days, and then restarts again. I find it to be very odd.
System specs for good measure:
Orion 600 W PSU
AMD Athlon II X3 440 (overclocked to 3.14 ghZ, raised the CPU multiplier to x13 from x10)
MSI G40-775 motherboard
1 GB inno3D GTX 550 ti
4 GB DDR3 RAM
500 GB Samsung SATA HD
