Ampers on Volt Rails
 

I recntely decided to re-new a friend of mine's computer. He had troubles with it when it came to gamming. After playing a game for a while (World of Warcraft and CS:Source) the game would freeze and the same image would be displayed for about 10-15 seconds, while the sound either kept going or looped around a bit, and then the game would resume (95% of the time) or the pc would reboot (5%) of the time. We tried alot, and I mean alot of things. Lower/Increasing the AGP latency did not help. It's not the graphics card (he went through 3 of them, his latest purchase being a 7600GT), it's not the drivers, it's not everything that I could think of. Only thing left was the motherboard. However, he did not want to spend any more money on it so he decided to completely abandon his "project".

Any, long story short, and to get to the point, while I was testing it today I noticed something interesting. While running Nvidia Geoforms, the graphics froze up again (the usual 10-15sec thing and then resumed), however, I noticed that whenever the freezing did occur the LED case fans seemed to go blank and then suddenly light up in a matter of seconds. This led to me to the conclusion that maybe the PSU is what is really having the problem. It's nothing fancy, came with the cheap, piece of sh_t case he bought with it, so there is no surprise of it's a piece of sh_t psu. It's rated at 450W. However, I think the ampere's it's supplying aren't enough. Not to mention the 12v rail runs at an odd 13.xxv (readings from SpeedFan).

The rails are rated as follows:
+3.3v --22A
+5v --15A
+12v1 --14A
+12v2 -- 16A
+5vsb --2.5A
-12v --0.3A

I'm not too good with electronic info, so help me out here. What exactly is the benefit of multiple rails? Also, do you guys think that those ampers are too low for what he is running:

Pentium D 820 @ stock 2.8Ghz
2x512mb DDR-333 SDRAM
7600GT AGP
2xOptical Drives
300gb Seagate SATA

It's the PSU or the motherboard. Could be either. It's a pain in the *** to try to boot the PC after re-installing the ram. Sometimes it will boot, sometimes it won't. None of the ram slots are defective and neither sticks are defective (I've checked). You have to force the ram down into it and apply a nice amount of pressure even after it has clipped in, and then I found it to boot.

Well anyway to sum this thread up. Is the PSU too weak to handle the system?

450W, that Pentium D 820 is a power guzzler that's for sure, can you check voltage levels in BIOS? remove all extra goodies, disconnect optical drives, unplug case fans and then try the VGA heavy benches again.

also see if you can hook up the 7600GT AGP on a power cable NOT shared with any other device.

I tested the 7600Gt hooked up to it's own molex, and the hard drive on another cable, no fans, no optical drives. The results where the same, that 15 second freezing came eventually.

The BIOS reports as following:
3.306v on the 3.3v
5.103v on the 5.5v
12.144v on the 12v

I have a spare PSU around, a 240W or so. I'm going to hook that up seperatly to the graphics card while the remaining system is going to be run off of the current PSU and see what happens then. If the fails then there is only one more thing left to diagnose and thats the motherboard...

Bah. Two PSUs, one for the system and a separate 250W one for the graphics card and still the 15-20second freeze =P So now it's down to the motherboard. So now the question is, as I have addressed in this thread, what is a good, overclockable, pentium D compatible, AGP compatible motherboard?

I'm quite happy with my €40 Asrock 775Dual-VSTA
http://www.google.be/search?q=asrock+VSTA

supports AGP/PCIe and DDR1/DDR2, good OC options (DDR timings and FSB control)
only lacks vcore increase option, but at stock most P4/D/C2D will already OC nicely.

I just wanted to reply saying thank you ;) I ordered the motherboard (775 DualVSTA) and I have to say I like it so far. I haven't done much of graphics stress testing, but from what I did do I noticed no freezing! As for the overclocking features, the RAM overclocking is loaded with options, wish I could say the same for the CPU as well, but I did manage a 3.0ghz+ (2.8ghz stock) overclock with the ram running at DDR400 (DDR333 stock) at 1:1 without having to tweak and adjust many settings (basically just increasing the the clock speed by 10mhz and seeing when the computer crashes and when the ram sets itself away from 1:1). So like I said, thanks again!

It seems I ran into a bit of trouble. The CD/DVD drive was acting up (corrupt data being installed, or missing files, incorrent transfer...the usuall "something is fscked up") I started by switching out the IDE cable (I tried about 3) and all of them gave me the same results (errors when trying to install a game). I then remembered reading something about frequency adjustments and locking your PCI clock and all that good stuff. So I reset the oc back to stock settings and everything worked great. The game (WoW) installed without a hint of error. So I figure my over clocking must be the cause. The DualVSTA allows me to select a certain clock for the PCI frequency which I left at 33.33Mhz, I can also select a PCIE frequency which I left at 100Mhz. However I did read on a forum where a guy had to actually adjust his PCIE frequency to 112Mhz in order to get his desired over clock on this same board. Maybe I need to adjust the PCI frequency higher than 33.33Mhz. However I have no idea what to select it on and how safe it is. I have options ranging from 33.33Mhz up to 37.50Mhz. Anyone know of any info that could help out here?

37Mhz is still do-able for PCI speed, above 40Mhz you risk data corruption; other motherboards have experienced the same things where you need to set PCIe tot 101 to enable the "lock";

I'm using SATA devices, so can't really comment on first hand experience in that area with this board

Crap. I set the PCIe 101 and the PCI to 37.50 and when I booted windows found corrupt files and the screen only displayed in like 8-bit color mode. Then I restarted, and set the overclock settings back to default, but it was too late. Now it can't load into windows anymore :(. Infact, I'm having the same trouble trying to get to boot from a Windows XP cd I had a while back with another computer :(

I found a link to a new BIOS at softpedia - http://drivers.softpedia.com/get/BIO...BIOS-250.shtml

It says it can lock the PCI/PCIE so I might try that out. Only after I figure out how to get the hard drive working again :P

sure your CD is not corrupt? :)

Ok. I got somewhere. I was able to boot into my Windows CD (I removed the SATA at boot, and connected it while the disk was "detecting hardware settings") and it would boot into the cd AND have acess to my hard drive. I entered the recovery consol and performed a chkdsk /R which seemed to fix the problem and create a new one. Now whenever I wanted to acess the drive with recovery consol or even with Windows format I would get redirected to a Registry Error BSOD. I searched around a bit on the net and didn't find an exact solution to the problem. So I decided to whipe the drive clean and format. I found KillDisk and used it to Zero my drive, after which I can now boot from the CD (without having to do any fancy SATA removal) and format.

hehe, possible corrupt file partition, had similar thing happen with Windows going nuts when trying to access HDD, had to do low level format to get it working again :/

Yeah but I couldn't even format. Well, at least not with the Windows Disc, as it would always go into BSOD when I wanted to acess the partition with windows format tool.

low level format is through tools provided by the manufacturer of the hard drive:)

Heh.. http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD I'll keep that in mind next time :)