hey.. i recently bought an Athlon Xp 1600+ ... the casing i bought was with a p3 power supply... at that time i didn't know that it really mattered. after a month the system started rebooting by itself whenever i ran a game or a multimedia benchmark on Sisoft Sandra. from a friends advice bought a new 300W powersupply and that solved the matter. the games ran well and so did the multimedia benchmark. but after a while the system started rebooting again when i ran the multimedia benchmark!

Can anyone help?

P.s. which components does the multimedia benckmark test

Well, I'm not quite sure what you mean by "P3 power supply" - you don't say what the wattage is, for example; is it 300W? 350W? 400W? - but I can tell you that one thing you should definitely do is get yourself an AMD-certified power supply. Athlons and Athlon XP's draw so much power that they're best run with power supplies that have been verified by AMD to work well with those CPU's. Antec (which I use) and Enermax power supplies are particularly recommended. Also, you might be having heat problems - Athlons crank out a lot of heat. What do the system temperature and CPU temperature readouts in SiSoft Sandra say?

-Joe-

Saying you have a 300 watt power supply is like saying you have a computer, it doesn't tell us very much at all about the equipment. You can buy a 500watt power supply with inadequate power in the 12volt leg and it will fail to do the job. Please tell us more about your system and which power supply you got. As was already said, it could also be heat or any number of other issues.

And Welcome to http://www.pcguide.com/ubb/pcgubb.gif