Charlie Brookhart said:
CPU is a P4 2.6G. What is involved in changing out the power supply? Is
that something that is easy to do?
4 screws on the back, one big mobo ATX power connector, maybe a secondary
one too, all the peripheral power plugs...what, five minutes, maybe fifteen
to 1/2 hr. for the neat freak or first-timer? No biggie. Some Dell boxes
(not all...) you have to watch out for (Dell sucks!) because they use
non-standard pinouts on the mobo power connector, which will fry the mobo
and PSU unless you fancy a Dell direct replacement or a little pinout
rearrangement on the ol' mobo plug...always check model-specific specs...
The one thing I will say for Dell is that their power supplies are fairly
good, despite perhaps a low rating, even if their "Dell Dude" got nabbed
buying a bag of doobage in extremely indiscreet fashion, and they outsource
their tech support to the lowest bidder in India or God-only-knows where
else, where they tell you "Reinstall Windows" in broken English to just
about everything...
If your box is not stuffed with cards and drives, your existing power supply
*might* work fine, although 250W seems a little low for comfort, and I
definitely agree it should be swapped for at least a decent 400-watter just
for GP's. I've had 9800 Pros working fine being fed by 300W PSUs in many
cases. The overall wattage rating can be a little deceptive. One should suss
out what the amperage output for each rail (+/- 12v, +/- 5v, 3.3v, with the
+es being critical), and the current ripple spec, etc. VA=W, and the sum of
the amperage ratings on each rail multiplied by wall socket voltage (it sez
115 on the back of the PSU on the little red voltage switch here, or 230 for
most of our foreign friends, though it reads ~121 from my UPS sockets...)
should add up to the overall wattage rating (sometimes it doesn't...).
Apparently the Radeons with the Molex connector (separate power plug) draw
power from the 5v. rail; I'd look for a rating of no less than 25A here (+5
rail), preferably 30-40. Some high-rated cheapo PSUs are rated at surge max,
rather than continuous stable output, like cheapo audio amps and speakers
are rated at PMPO or peak transient handling, rather than RMS, which is
industry standard. And some put out extremely "dirty" power at their
otherwise accurate rating...the readout on the ol' Fluke drifts all over the
place under continuous load (I have a carbon pile resistor to simulate a
consistent, calibrated load...)...the sign of the "cheap capacitor blues",
usually...
I just looked and found a good page with PSU requirement info very
well-described, because I think it will help people out a bit:
http://firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Guides&fs_article_i
d=1162
Make sure you completely uninstall the Nvidia video drivers thru the control
panel and reboot to standard VGA before uninstalling and plopping in the new
card. It also helps to either change the card right before reboot after
uninstall, or delete the previous card's "Standard VGA" listing from Device
Manager, so your new card is the only one enumerated in the registry.
Residual traces of competitors' driver files can really mess things up
sometimes. Nvidia's driver uninstall scripts are rather thorough. ATI's have
gotten much better recently (they used to leave all sorts of orphaned
entries requiring a major exorcism, or a serious rollback, which is a
feature I don't really need, but is very useful for many...), now they only
leave a few mostly non-critical slop behind. Other manufacturers' driver
packages are not nearly so well self-policing as either Nvidia's or ATI's.
Creative soundcard driver packages are right at the bottom of the barrel,
they leave so much crap behind. I just bebop into the registry and clean it
all out, and S'n'D applicable system files, but this ain't for
everyone...and this type of humbuggery brings us back to "Standard Tech
Support Sinecure 101": "Fdisk. Reformat. Reinstall Windoze"...
HTH.
.
