X800 Pro and power supply

[David Gouge]

Hi all,

Took delivery of a Sapphire X800 Pro 256Mb yesterday. During first tests of
doom3 and far cry suffered many freezes, blue screen crashes and even a
couple of complete reboots. It also froze then rebooted in windows once. A
couple of posts on various message boards made me think it might be a power
supply problem as I have 2 hds, cd rom, dvd rom and now the x800 and a cheap
and nasty 400Watt psu. Disconnected the cdrom and one hd and it now seems
to be pretty stable and i have been able to start upping the quality in far
cry.

Haven't had much of a chance to investigate further, but can the power
supply cause these symptoms? Or is it a fluke that it stopped freezing and
is more likely to be something else?

If it is the power supply, what do i need to look for in a good one?

Thanks in advance,

Dave

Specs:

Sapphire ATI Radeon X800Pro 256Mb (latest drivers, 4.10 i think)
AMD Athlon XP 2800+
512Mb PC2700 Ram
Abit KV7 (latest bios)
Windows XP SP2

 

[Chip]

Hi all,

Took delivery of a Sapphire X800 Pro 256Mb yesterday. During first tests
of doom3 and far cry suffered many freezes, blue screen crashes and even a
couple of complete reboots. It also froze then rebooted in windows once.
A couple of posts on various message boards made me think it might be a
power supply problem as I have 2 hds, cd rom, dvd rom and now the x800 and
a cheap and nasty 400Watt psu. Disconnected the cdrom and one hd and it
now seems to be pretty stable and i have been able to start upping the
quality in far cry.

Haven't had much of a chance to investigate further, but can the power
supply cause these symptoms? Or is it a fluke that it stopped freezing
and is more likely to be something else?

It could easily be your PSU. On the other hand, if could be something else.
That's one of the problems of a cheap and nasty PSU: when you have problems,
you never know whether it might be the PSU or not.

Personally, I wouldn't touch a "cheap and nasty" PSU with a barge pole and I
would take this as a golden opportunity to get rid of it. Personally, I
would replace it with the best new PSU I could afford and that would almost
certainly mean I would go for an OCZ Powerstream 470 or 520. These PSU's
have *everything* you could possibly want in a PSU: Powerful, adjustable,
lots of connectors, quiet, future proof. Quite superb.

Anything less is a compromise, imho.

Chip

 

[David Gouge]

It could easily be your PSU. On the other hand, if could be something
else. That's one of the problems of a cheap and nasty PSU: when you have
problems, you never know whether it might be the PSU or not.

Personally, I wouldn't touch a "cheap and nasty" PSU with a barge pole and
I would take this as a golden opportunity to get rid of it. Personally, I
would replace it with the best new PSU I could afford and that would
almost certainly mean I would go for an OCZ Powerstream 470 or 520. These
PSU's have *everything* you could possibly want in a PSU: Powerful,
adjustable, lots of connectors, quiet, future proof. Quite superb.

Anything less is a compromise, imho.

Chip

Cheers Chip, I'm going to just get the good psu in and then go from there.
If i still get crashes then i will have narrowed it down a bit and got a
shiny new psu as a bonus. :O)

Probably time to think about some extra cooling aswell.

Thanks

Dave

 

[Bob Huntley]

I'm not convinced this is the source of your problem.

I'm using a X800 Pro with a 300W PSU (not "cheap & nasty" admittedly), plus
2 hds, dvd rom, dvd writer, Pentium 4 3.06 GHz - no problems at all.

 

[DaveW]

Your "nasty 400 Watt power supply" is the most likely the problem. You need
to invest in a QUALITY brand and wattage output power supply (i.e. Antec.)
You're trying to power a Hum-Vee vehicle with a Volkswagon beetle engine.

 

[Chip]

I'm not convinced this is the source of your problem.

I'm using a X800 Pro with a 300W PSU (not "cheap & nasty" admittedly)

And therein lies the difference. Perhaps you any idea how bad some of these
cheap PSU's can be. Take the QTec 550w PSU, for example. Qtec is even 1
step up from cheap and nasty. At least they have a brand name and you would
think they might be a bit better than the plethora of no-name PSU's.

Well the Qtec 550w has a maximum 12v output of 14A. That's absolutely
pathetic for a 550w PSU. I'll bet your 300watter is as good as that.

God help anyone with a 300w Qtec!

Chip

 

[David Gouge]

Hi Dave, thanks for the reply.

Have relegated my old psu to the bin and got myselft an Antec 450W psu and
(although not as frequent) I am still getting the freezes, especially in
doom3. If I unplug the power to my secondary harddisk, there are no freezes
whatsoever nd the game runs like a dream.

I'm going to do some testing to try and narrow it down, but this is getting
frustrating.

Thanks for the replies.

 

[John Hall]

If you haven't connected the hard drive and video card to separate leads
from the power supply, try that. They should each be on separate outputs.

JK