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8800GT Enough Power?

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C

catchsomezz

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Mar 27, 2007
i use to own a 2900PRO but it caused random restarts because of the lack of power from my 520W psu

do you think the 8800GT consumes less power? low enough that the 520W is suffice?
 
benscoobert said:
what is the rest of your system?
Click to expand...

Besides what is in my sig...

2 x hard drives
Xplosion Sound Card
2 external HD connected via USB


...i cant think of anything else.

What I'm afraid of it (the reason I cancelled my order) is I read a couple reviews on power consumption and it seems that the 8800GT/S consume approx the same amount of watts as the 2900PRO. That is whats making me have second thoughts
 
Check out my sig


The Corsair 520HX- specs

Output +3.3@24A,+5V@24A,+12V1@18A,+12V2@18A,+12V3@18A,- [email protected],+5VSB@3A

Yes, will be more than enough. I would go as far to say you could probably SLi 8800GTs, without OCing of course.

My PSU is 470W with +12V @ 26A and I have the Ram, CPU and GPU OC'd as you can see below, running smoothly with no hiccups.
 
Last edited:
jason4207 said:
Why are you so certain a lack of power was causing your PC to restart?
Click to expand...

actually im not. but that is what i concluded after a discussion in the ATI section of this forum.

a short summary of what has happened so far....

I had a 7900GS, pretty good OC-er, after 6-7 months, my comp suddenly stopped POSTing. Long story short, I narrowed it down to the video card. I exchanged it for a 2900PRO. All is going well, but when I tried to OC with RivaTuner and benchmarking with 3DMark06, the computer would sometimes freeze or restart during the middle of the 3DMark06 test. Moreover, it would sometimes restart while playing COD4. I just stopped playing games/overclocking it. And recently it would freeze/restart in the middle of Medieval II.

Besides power, I'm not sure what else can be wrong.
 
catchsomezz said:
actually im not. but that is what i concluded after a discussion in the ATI section of this forum.

a short summary of what has happened so far....

I had a 7900GS, pretty good OC-er, after 6-7 months, my comp suddenly stopped POSTing. Long story short, I narrowed it down to the video card. I exchanged it for a 2900PRO. All is going well, but when I tried to OC with RivaTuner and benchmarking with 3DMark06, the computer would sometimes freeze or restart during the middle of the 3DMark06 test. Moreover, it would sometimes restart while playing COD4. I just stopped playing games/overclocking it. And recently it would freeze/restart in the middle of Medieval II.

Besides power, I'm not sure what else can be wrong.
Click to expand...

You have an unstable OC? Did you try everything at stock settings??
 
for the 2900PRO and 7900GS, yes. I reverted back to stock settings but with the same respective results.
for the cpu, no. i just kept it at the speed that i always had it as.
 
catchsomezz said:
actually im not. but that is what i concluded after a discussion in the ATI section of this forum.

a short summary of what has happened so far....

I had a 7900GS, pretty good OC-er, after 6-7 months, my comp suddenly stopped POSTing. Long story short, I narrowed it down to the video card. I exchanged it for a 2900PRO. All is going well, but when I tried to OC with RivaTuner and benchmarking with 3DMark06, the computer would sometimes freeze or restart during the middle of the 3DMark06 test. Moreover, it would sometimes restart while playing COD4. I just stopped playing games/overclocking it. And recently it would freeze/restart in the middle of Medieval II.

Besides power, I'm not sure what else can be wrong.
Click to expand...

Catch,

Unless your power supply is faulty, and as others have stated, it's not a lack of power output, that's for sure.
 
catchsomezz said:
:( what do you think the problem might be?
Click to expand...
Unstable or faulty memory is usually the cause of my BSODs/reboots. Memtest86+ alone wasn't enough to detect the faulty memory though. I had to run one stick at a time and conduct Prime95/Orthos torture testing in Windows to find the bad stick.

I concur with others saying that your PSU is PLENTY powerful for either of those cards. I'm using a Fortron AX500-A PSU, which I believe is around 480W, and it's powering my overclocked Q6600, 8800GT, 2x2GB of memory, and 2 HDDs just fine. In general I think people are way too quick to blame PSUs for instability problems on most hardware forums.
 
mmmm.

the things is. the computer only freezes/restarts while playing games. Besides Memtest, I've ran Orthos (but two stick at a time) for over 10 hrs, I fold 24/7, never froze/restarted.

but within 10 mins of running, lets say, Medieval II, it restarts.

is this consistent with faulty memory? if it is, theres nothing to do but buy two memory right? or can i just lower the freq?
 
catchsomezz said:
mmmm.

the things is. the computer only freezes/restarts while playing games. Besides Memtest, I've ran Orthos (but two stick at a time) for over 10 hrs, I fold 24/7, never froze/restarted.

but within 10 mins of running, lets say, Medieval II, it restarts.

is this consistent with faulty memory? if it is, theres nothing to do but buy two memory right? or can i just lower the freq?
Click to expand...
And this behavior has been observed with two different video cards, both running stock clocks? It seems unlikely that you'd have two faulty video cards, so maybe it's driver-related? Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers? How about reinstalling Windows? Does the crashing happen in multiple games, or just one or two? Are you running onboard sound, or an add-in card? Creative cards are notorious for causing crashes during gaming. Have you set up Windows to display a BSOD instead of automatically restarting when it crashes? If not, you should do this and tell us what the error message says.

EDIT: I see now that you're running an add-in sound card. Tell us what your BSOD error message says. It may point towards the sound or video drivers.
 
catchsomezz said:
mmmm.

the things is. the computer only freezes/restarts while playing games. Besides Memtest, I've ran Orthos (but two stick at a time) for over 10 hrs, I fold 24/7, never froze/restarted.

but within 10 mins of running, lets say, Medieval II, it restarts.

is this consistent with faulty memory? if it is, theres nothing to do but buy two memory right? or can i just lower the freq?
Click to expand...

Sounds like memory to me.

Get a Memtest86 running for at least 6hours. F@H does not use too much memory which is the reason why when you start a game, it probably just tips it over the edge.
 
Hmm, sounds like what happened to me. Turns out that the PCIE slot was shot and causing graphics cards to short out, dieing after a month or two. Everything ran fine until I ran something graphics intensive, then the system will lock up after a few minutes. But I doubt thats it, since I think the PCIE slot went screwy after my GPU waterblock sprung a massive leak while my system was running.
Theres almost no chance you have the same problem as I did, just saying there are other causes besides an underpowered psu then can cause those problems, and what I can tell the 520HX is one of the more recommended psus on the forums.
 
I have an Xplosion sound card that I installed after I replaced the 7900GS.

I think I explained something wrong. The symptoms aren't the same. With the 7900GS, working fine for a pretty long period of time, then crapped out. What i meant was, it wouldn't POST consistently. However, when I was able to get it to POST (sometimes) I felt that it was running sub-par. all the games i've tried ran lagged a bit more than before (i dont know). This continued even when i returned to stock clocks. So the irregularing POSTing warranted for a replacement, the 2900PRO.

Now the 2900PRO POSTs fine, but when entering games, will freeze/restart like I've mentioned.

How to setup Windows to display a BSOD instaed of restarting? it did BSOD once, I didn't write it down, but it had something like NON_PAGING_FILE or omsething like that.

I will try to run Memtest when i get back from work today

EDIT: I forgot to address the driver issue. I uninsatlled/reinstalled multiple times the drivesr. But I haven't reinstalled Windows even after switching from 7900GS to 2900PRO (I was sort of hoping to avoid that). Do you think that could be the source of my problem?
 
Last edited:
catchsomezz said:
How to setup Windows to display a BSOD instaed of restarting? it did BSOD once, I didn't write it down, but it had something like NON_PAGING_FILE or omsething like that.
Click to expand...
In Windows XP: Start => Control Panel => System, go to "Advanced" tab and click the Startup and Recovery "Settings" button. In the dialog box that appears, uncheck the box next to "Automatically restart" in event of System failure.
 
catchsomezz said:
How to setup Windows to display a BSOD instaed of restarting? it did BSOD once, I didn't write it down, but it had something like NON_PAGING_FILE or omsething like that.
Click to expand...

Catch,

The others gave you some good possibilities and I think they all could be valid BUT the BSOD message in full is important. Copy the whole message next time and post it and we can go from there. Don't panic, there is usually a simple solution to those errors. They usually list a file name causing the error, that's what we're looking for to start.
 
With memory testing, do not use windows based testers. The issue with them is that they only check the free memory, not any thats already allocated. Use a boot tester ( i think memtest has a version, google it) that checks 100% of the ram, not just the un-allocated part
 
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