Is there enough power?

[Newshound]

Hi everyone,

I have a Chieftec 360W power supply (nothing special, it came with the
Dragon case), but I think I'm getting power supply issues. I was
making a huge RAR file (with 4gb of data from one drive, saving onto
another) and I accessed my cd-rom at the same time and it all went
bye-bye and the system froze. It did this in other similar situations
where there were a lot of devices in use.

I haven't really had many problems before but then this is the first
time I've used my cd-rom at the same time as doing anything else. I
have the following hardware:

A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard
AMD 3000+ (not O/C)
1Gb TwinMOS PC3200 ram
LG 8x DVD recorder
Sony 16x DVD player
5 case fans (plus PSU fan, plus Aero7+ CPU fan)
2x WD 120Gb Special Edition EIDE drives
1x Seagate 160Gb SATA drive
Geforce FX5950 Ultra 256Mb (a little bit O/C'd)
Odds and sods like a usb powered scanner and webcam

According to Asus utility my voltages are:

+12V: ~ 12v
+5V: ~ 4.8v
+3.3V: ~ 3.4v

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening? I'll buy a new
fancy PSU if that'll help.

Cheers!

 

[Darkfalz]

+12V: ~ 12v

+5V: ~ 4.8v
+3.3V: ~ 3.4v

Watch the 12v and Vcore levels under stress, if they are dipping more than
just a little, PSU could well be your problem.

I run my system (below) on 250 Watt AOpen PSU but I know from experience
that all PSUs are not created equal, and it actually performs better than a
generic 400 Watt I got for free. However if I overclock a lot, I can tell
the system is crashing from a lack of power (P4s use a lot of wattage) more
than anything else, so I'm pretty much at the limit if I wanted to add a
more powerful video card or another piece of hardware.

ASUS P4P800 Deluxe
Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz HT
512 MB Kingston PC3200 CL3 Dual Channel
nVidia GeforceFX 5200 128 MB
SoundMAX Digital Audio
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 60 GB
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120 GB
SONY CRX300E CDRW/DVD-ROM

 

[Paul]

Hi everyone,

I have a Chieftec 360W power supply (nothing special, it came with the
Dragon case), but I think I'm getting power supply issues. I was
making a huge RAR file (with 4gb of data from one drive, saving onto
another) and I accessed my cd-rom at the same time and it all went
bye-bye and the system froze. It did this in other similar situations
where there were a lot of devices in use.

I haven't really had many problems before but then this is the first
time I've used my cd-rom at the same time as doing anything else. I
have the following hardware:

A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard
AMD 3000+ (not O/C)
1Gb TwinMOS PC3200 ram
LG 8x DVD recorder
Sony 16x DVD player
5 case fans (plus PSU fan, plus Aero7+ CPU fan)
2x WD 120Gb Special Edition EIDE drives
1x Seagate 160Gb SATA drive
Geforce FX5950 Ultra 256Mb (a little bit O/C'd)
Odds and sods like a usb powered scanner and webcam

According to Asus utility my voltages are:

+12V: ~ 12v
+5V: ~ 4.8v
+3.3V: ~ 3.4v

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening? I'll buy a new
fancy PSU if that'll help.

Cheers!

http://www.chieftec.com/products/psu/atx_psu.htm (all PSU)
http://www.chieftec.com/products/psu/PSII PSU.htm (HPC-360)

5V@35A 3.3V@28A 12V@17A

Processor 12V@8A rough estimate
Hard drive [email protected]*3 HD plus the CD while using = 2.0A
Fans [email protected]
Video card 5V@10A plus [email protected]
(http://takaman.jp/psu_calc.html?english has some info)

Total 12.5A on the +12V

To me, that doesn't make the PSU immediately guilty. Use the "log
to text file" option in MBM5 or Asus Probe, to keep track of the
PSU voltages while doing other work. After a crash, examine the
log file, to see if any of the voltages is getting 5% or more
below nominal value. Try playing a game for a short period of
time, then go and examine the log file etc.

It could be temperature related or driver related.

What happens if the 5950 is returned to stock clock settings ?

Is motherboard memory clock synchronous to FSB ?

HTH,
Paul

 

[Arnie Berger]

Hi everyone,

I have a Chieftec 360W power supply (nothing special, it came with the
Dragon case), but I think I'm getting power supply issues. I was
making a huge RAR file (with 4gb of data from one drive, saving onto
another) and I accessed my cd-rom at the same time and it all went
bye-bye and the system froze. It did this in other similar situations
where there were a lot of devices in use.

I haven't really had many problems before but then this is the first
time I've used my cd-rom at the same time as doing anything else. I
have the following hardware:

A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard
AMD 3000+ (not O/C)
1Gb TwinMOS PC3200 ram
LG 8x DVD recorder
Sony 16x DVD player
5 case fans (plus PSU fan, plus Aero7+ CPU fan)
2x WD 120Gb Special Edition EIDE drives
1x Seagate 160Gb SATA drive
Geforce FX5950 Ultra 256Mb (a little bit O/C'd)
Odds and sods like a usb powered scanner and webcam

According to Asus utility my voltages are:

+12V: ~ 12v
+5V: ~ 4.8v
+3.3V: ~ 3.4v

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening? I'll buy a new
fancy PSU if that'll help.

Cheers!

If you depend upon your computer to do real work, and you would be
extremely distressed if you lost, say 3 or 4 hours of work, then you
should buy the most reliable power supply you can afford. Generally,
reliability also means "headroom", so this generally translates to a
power supply of at least 400W. But that's my opinion.

Unfortunately, there is no standard as to how the total power is
partitioned among the various voltages, so a Brand X 300W supply could
have different current limits from a 300W Brand Y supply, even though
their voltage rails are the same. Also, there isn't a spec that I'm
aware of as to how long a supply should be able to work at full
output.

Lastly, when any of your disk drives, CD, DVD, floppy or HD start to
spin up, they can draw several times the current that they require
when they are up and running, so that might explain why the freeze-up
occured when it did.

Power supplies are so incredibly inexpensive these days. When I was a
Hardware Designer for HP, we figured $1 per watt for a power supply
(our cost).

My advice: Buy a good supply with plenty of headroom and that will
elimanate it as a possible problem source.

arnie

 

[Kent_Diego]

making a huge RAR file (with 4gb of data from one drive, saving onto

another) ...

The FAT32 file size limit is 4 GB. Do you have NTFS on both drives?

 

[Stephan Grossklass]

Power supplies are so incredibly inexpensive these days. When I was a
Hardware Designer for HP, we figured $1 per watt for a power supply
(our cost).

Mass production has made things a lot cheaper, that's for sure. But I
still wondern how much power the old "200 watt" AT PSUs could really
deliver... I have one that looks rather spacious inside, no real huge
heatsinks. In comparison to that, a 250W Fortron is rather stuffed - of
course it also runs hardware that is much more power hungry. A decent
PSU for all but the most demanding (dual Xeon etc.) systems can be had
for ~50 US-$ or even a bit less these days, which makes at most
25cents/watt (or a nominal 16.7 cents/watt for a 300W unit).
BTW it's rather easy to test whether a >=400 watt PSU is up to its
claims - if it runs a dual Xeon or Athlon box with relative ease, it
probably is.

Stephan

 

[DaveW]

I would get a 430 Watt Antec TruPower power supply to make sure you're
REALLY getting 430 actual watts. Cheaper power supplies almost never are
capable of continuously putting out their rated power. That's why they're
cheap.

 

[Newshound]

If you depend upon your computer to do real work, and you would be
extremely distressed if you lost, say 3 or 4 hours of work, then you
should buy the most reliable power supply you can afford. Generally,
reliability also means "headroom", so this generally translates to a
power supply of at least 400W. But that's my opinion.

Thanks to everyone that's replied so far...

Unfortunately :'( I do do real work on my PC, and it could prove a big
big headache if anything was to go majorly wrong (never mind just a
normal crash).

I've had a go at rearranging my molnex connectors (I think that's the
right name for the them) so that each drive has it's own one direct
from the PSU. The graphics card is now at the end of four case fans
and straight away when I login into XP it says that it's "not
receiving enough power" so it is slowing itself down automatically
(even when not O/C'd). However the system is no longer crashing and I
can burn & zip to my heart's content (but not play any games!!).
Conclusion: power is the problem to some degree.

I've been looking around for a new PSU, and I think I'll get the
"Enermax EG465AX-VE(G)(FMA) 460W ATX Power Supply (CA-004-EN)" for
about 56 GBP from Overclockers.co.uk. Reckon that'll be enough? It
certainly has enough connectors so that the fans can be by themselves
on a molnex.

Cheers

 

[rstlne]

(e-mail address removed) (Arnie Berger) wrote in message

Thanks to everyone that's replied so far...

Unfortunately :'( I do do real work on my PC, and it could prove a big
big headache if anything was to go majorly wrong (never mind just a
normal crash).

I've had a go at rearranging my molnex connectors (I think that's the
right name for the them) so that each drive has it's own one direct
from the PSU. The graphics card is now at the end of four case fans
and straight away when I login into XP it says that it's "not
receiving enough power" so it is slowing itself down automatically
(even when not O/C'd). However the system is no longer crashing and I
can burn & zip to my heart's content (but not play any games!!).
Conclusion: power is the problem to some degree.

I've been looking around for a new PSU, and I think I'll get the
"Enermax EG465AX-VE(G)(FMA) 460W ATX Power Supply (CA-004-EN)" for
about 56 GBP from Overclockers.co.uk. Reckon that'll be enough? It
certainly has enough connectors so that the fans can be by themselves
on a molnex.

Cheers

Molex
Anyhow.. No need to rearrange it as all the wires are connected to the same
point (or rather all of the same color are)..
The only exception to this might be the new +12v wires for the atx12v spec
(I dont know if they do or dont but I have a good guess)

Now I havent ever heard of WINXP knowing that the pc doesnt have enough
power. (I think that's a bit odd really). I dont have the original thread
(just your post) and I cant remember if you said you had a p4 or a AMD
system. If you have a p4 system make sure that the 4 pin connector is on the
mobo, It delivers that extra juice that a p4 sucks..

 

[Newshound]

I would get a 430 Watt Antec TruPower power supply to make sure you're
REALLY getting 430 actual watts. Cheaper power supplies almost never are
capable of continuously putting out their rated power. That's why they're
cheap.

Ooooh yeah, like the sound of them... Apparently they have power
cables for fans only so they can vary their speed.

I can get the 430, the 480 or the 550? Shall I splash out d'u'think?

 

[end user]

Common sense dictates that if you buy a new PSU get the biggest one
you can get, especially if you have a modern system and plan to add
HD's, more powerful video cards etc.

Buyer beware of cheap high voltage PSU,s as they are.......cheap.

Do your homework, antec, thermaltake... are good, look for the watt
breakdown on the individual rails especially the 12 volt rail which
supplies juice to the power hungry cpu (P4) and to the HD's and
optical drives.

It is true that you can get more stable power from a quality 350w PSU
that a cheap 500w PSU

Locust

 

[Newshound]

Now I havent ever heard of WINXP knowing that the pc doesnt have enough
power. (I think that's a bit odd really). I dont have the original thread
(just your post) and I cant remember if you said you had a p4 or a AMD
system. If you have a p4 system make sure that the 4 pin connector is on the
mobo, It delivers that extra juice that a p4 sucks..

It's the "Nvidia Sentinel" that pops up saying it doesn't have enough
juice, I guess it monitors the power connection. It go so bad this
morning that it just continually popped up as soon as I logged in...
I've left it switched off until I get the new one.

I'm gonna go for the Antec 550w and see if that'll do the trick... I
need a new PSU anyway, so if it's no better, then no big deal.

Cheers for all your advive everyone!

 

[Stephan Grossklass]

I'm gonna go for the Antec 550w and see if that'll do the trick... I
need a new PSU anyway, so if it's no better, then no big deal.

You'll certainly not need a good 550 watt PSU like this one by far. A
good 400W PSU would be more than sufficient - like a Fortron/Sparkle
FSP400-60PFN, also sold as the 400W Zalman thingy. These are EPS12V PSUs
and should therefore be able to drive even a power hungry Dual Xeon 3.2
system with a QuadroFX 2000, which is not too shabby.

Stephan

 

[Sarak]

Hi everyone,

I have a Chieftec 360W power supply (nothing special, it came with the
Dragon case), but I think I'm getting power supply issues. I was
making a huge RAR file (with 4gb of data from one drive, saving onto
another) and I accessed my cd-rom at the same time and it all went
bye-bye and the system froze. It did this in other similar situations
where there were a lot of devices in use.

I haven't really had many problems before but then this is the first
time I've used my cd-rom at the same time as doing anything else. I
have the following hardware:

A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard
AMD 3000+ (not O/C)
1Gb TwinMOS PC3200 ram
LG 8x DVD recorder
Sony 16x DVD player
5 case fans (plus PSU fan, plus Aero7+ CPU fan)
2x WD 120Gb Special Edition EIDE drives
1x Seagate 160Gb SATA drive
Geforce FX5950 Ultra 256Mb (a little bit O/C'd)
Odds and sods like a usb powered scanner and webcam

According to Asus utility my voltages are:

+12V: ~ 12v
+5V: ~ 4.8v
+3.3V: ~ 3.4v

Does anyone have any idea what might be happening? I'll buy a new
fancy PSU if that'll help.

Cheers!

I have built systems with more devices than u have in yours with a good 300
PSU, but as some pointed out not all PSU are equal. You hear people talking
about all this expensive hardware then buy a stock PSU. To me its one of
the most important components for a stable system. Antec truepower units
are relatively inexpensive and are awesome PSU. Sorry I know little about
your PSU supply reputation