CX500 - Too Little Load or Bad Unit?

[nvtshax0r]

I picked up a CX500 yesterday along with a number of other components with the intention of building a low power home servers. The motherboard is an Asus P8H67-M EVO, with a Core i5-2500K Processor. The only thing attached to the motherboard is a single sata 3.0g SSD. I attached a USB CD-ROM to the machine to do the OS installation, which went fine. I have a Kill-A-Watt meter attached at the wall to track how much power I'm pulling - during the install my usage peaked at 80W and at idle i'm pulling around 26W.

 

After the install I removed the CD drive and rebooted. Upon displaying the login screen, the system shut down and restarted seconds later with a message from the motherboard that there was a surge detected.

 

Long story short - I've determined that adding additional peripherals (a usb cd drive, an internal 3.5in hard drive, etc) causes the system to stabilize. I'm concerned that I may not have enough load on the power supply to maintain consistent power output. Is this a real possibility or is it more likely that I have a faulty power supply?

 

Note: I have disabled the motherboard's anti-surge detection and I experience the same results, just no more message at boot time.

[RAM GUY]

Please test the system again without Kill-A-Watt connected. The CPU and motherboard put more than enough load on the PSU to maintain ON state. Please let us know the result!

[nvtshax0r]

I did that and had the same result.

[c_user123]

I also ran into this issue but with and AMD 5350 and ASRock AM1B-ITX AM1. I tried with 2 different CX500's. I would get to bios then try to boot and it would shut down. With another PSU the machine is working fine. Now my 100 dollar machine has a 100 dollar titanium psu while my server uses a CX500.......