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Am I using too much power???

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Crash311

New Member
Joined
Apr 30, 2003
I am running an:

Athlon 2000+ XP
K7n2 nforce2 mobo
geforce4 Ti 4200
256 pc 2700 ram
Enermax 'truepower' 300watt PS
Samsung cdrom drive
Volcano 7+ and 1 casefan...

My cooling is kinda bad so i wanted to add an extra 2/3 fans...

I was just wonder if by adding these extra fans will my PS not be able to run everything... I ask this becasue when i first built my PC I had the same sepcs as above but i also had a CDrw and a Zip Drive and my graphic card was running really slow... i then took the cdrw out and the zip and it was fine... I herd this was because i didnt have enough power....

will 2/3 fans take up a lot... or not???


thanks
 
Well first of all...Nvidia NF2 boards want/need a min. of a 350W PSU...and if your TI 4200 has VIVO, then that alone does require a 350W PSU....

Heres the things to concider...how are your +5 and +12 rails at full load with that PSU...If your +5 drops below 4.75 and your +12 gets over 12.50 or more...then you are is need of a new PSU and adding more fans will under power your system...also cause reboots and stability issues when OCing...
 
I am running the following on a stock Dell 250w(the Britney Spears of PSUs):
P4 2.4GHz
640MB DDR SDRAM
GeForce 4 MX 420
2x 7200RPM 60GB Western Digital HDs
PCTV Pro
48x24x48x CD-RW
16x DVD-ROM
System is stable even with both CD drives going, distributed.net running(I crack RC5-72 for OCAU), and HDTV open(nothing overclocked).
Voltages(measured with a radioshack DMM):
12v: 11.99
5v: 5.02
3.3v: 3.30
Besides the rails being almost perfect, the PSU is very quiet(I cannot hear it over the CPU fan(which is very quiet, too)), so I think the Dell PSU is a modified Antec(it is WTX instead of ATX).
BTW, I reverse engineered an old dell supply from a p133.
That dell supply used a LITEON power transformer(at first, I thought they only made CD-ROM drives).
There is only one switching transistor(well, only one big primary transistor, as there is a smaller transistor in the 5VFP supply, and several big transistors on the secondary side), but it is a high-power IGBT(20A, 900v) in a TO-3 case.
The primary caps are 680uF each, for a total of 1360uF(most PC power supplies have only 2 470uF, or 940uF total)!
 
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