Lack of juice would be random lock ups, black screen of death when you get to desktop for the first time, random reboots, and other strangeness. I've had it during an upgrade what was a largely undersized PSU when I did my rebuild. I would boot, get up to a desktop and normally within 30 seconds the machine would reboot. As mentioned earlier, PSU's degrade over time, and giving no headroom, you'll hit the ceiling eventually. I've had a 3 year old 550W PSU with the video card recommending I had at minimum 550W PSU, and was having issues in games sometimes, as I recall?

You can get a plug passthrough device to check wattage consumption as well at the wall socket itself. Cheap one's are like $20.

Devon

Stability mostly. Things stopping working for a split second throwing everything else out of whack due to a mildly faulty PSU experiencing peaks and dips in the voltage. A lot of complaints that I've seen over the years where people get frustrated with a PC doing completly random BSODs normally come down to a bad PSU... these also tend to be the guys who spend £350 on a gfx card but £40 on a PSU.

*edit* meh, I missed page 2 when I hit reply. Ahh well, at least me and Devon agreed on the answer

Thankyou DevonB and Kaine.

That is really interesting. I never knew that. You learn something every day.

Never even thought about it really. Also didn't know that they degrade over time.

I guess I'll count myself lucky that mine is working perfectly and not push it any further.

I've dropped the OC to 3.42GHz, just to be on the safe side, though I did get her up to 3.8GHz. But I've done 18 hours of prime95 and LynX X 150 passes. Plus quite a few others. No problems at all.

So I guess a bit of Ableton won't hurt it.



cheers.