i don't smoke (cigarettes, hehe )

I smoke (cigarettes too).

I vote for PSU replacment. Wouldn't cost you more than $30 to get the 550W like I did.


It is really frustrating when you must guess the power consumption of your hardware. I'm wondering, is it really that hard to declare power consumption of a HD or GPU, or mobo... Would make things simpler when it comes to building PC's.

I smoke hair spray...:mrgreen:

Unfortunately I haven't seen something like this http://www.meisterkuehler.de/cms/energieverbrauch.html in english yet. (Scroll down the page a bit to see the power consumption calculator. You'll get some typical numbers for the various components this way, too)

that's some scary shit

Thx for the link.

Too bad that it is in german and outdated. (didn't find Athlon 64 +3700 nor GeForce 7800 GT, closest one was High-end vga with 512 MB)

AMD athlon +3700
PCTV SAT
1 GB network card (I've selected 2 for that reason)
1 firewire
1 sound card
1 sata drive
1 IDE drive
1 vga with 512 MB
1 DVD burner
1 CD rom
1 Floppy
all kinds of fans
10 (I think) USB ports
Modem


Turns out 352 W

More than one in question here.

Nope. The only one is they assume 140W for the "High end-512MB" - the 7800GT 512 MB takes only 55W according to this article.

I'm pretty sure your 3700+ does not consume more than 90W. The whole calculation has some margin of error and will give you a good approximation only. The result is a "worst case" maximum value.

My is GAINWARD GeForce 7800 GT 512 MB and it supports dual DVI unlike one in the test.
Nevertheless, I would be very pleased if it is 55W. That would mean that SLI would not require mo' power.

Taking in consideration possibility of OCing, I am convinced that the calculation is far from exact. I think that it should be used for approx. projection of power consumption when building PC.

It gives you a picture of what the PSU should and shouldn't be. I like that.

That's what the introductory article on top of that page says. For that purpose, +/- 20W doesn't matter. The other purpose of the page is to calculate the annual costs for the juice. I'm not sure if I really wanted to know that...:eek:

Yes, the G7x chips are pretty power-saving and cool running GPUs (latest 90 nm technology), but I wonder a bit about that 55W, too. But AFAIR they need less or at least not more power than the fastest Geforce 6 cards.

While I don't have an answer to your problem I thought I would describe my recent experience and what I have found so far.

A couple of weeks ago my Win2K system went down hard. Missing OS files during boot etc. In other words it was toast. After re-installing the OS I discovered that a 1GB memory module was dead. I also noticed that one of the three IDE hard drives in the system kept seeking randomly as if it was struggling, so I decided to get another one of those too.

Since I didn't want to keep buying the same old IDE hard drives I picked up an SATA drive (Seagate 750GB) and an Adaptec DuoConnect SATA board that plugs into a PCI slot. I quickly found that I was unable to format the new hard drive and that it was seeking randomly also. Using another PC I powered the new drive by itself and it stopped its seeking problem. So then I picked up a new power supply and no more seeking problem.

Unfortunately, I introduced a problem unknown to me by my upgrade. One that I have come to believe is somewhat common with these new SATA drives and controllers. My audio card (Soundblaster Audigy 4) clicks, stutters, hesitates and pops a lot. Especially if I do anything that causes the system to work harder while its playing back a sound file, open another program etc. This is a real bummer as I used this system to record a lot of old record albums. I never had any problems with the sound before installing the SATA hardware, even with the other power supply which does appear to be bad. Researching this on the internet I have found several posts from people who describe the same problems or try to explain why the SATA hardware is causing this. Basically, the only real solution I have heard so far is to get a motherboard that has a built-in SATA controller "On its own bus" and not sharing the PCI bus with your audio card.

Thanks for your report. This confirms the suspicion that the threadstarter's PSU is the problem.

Your sound problem can maybe solved by changing slots. I don't know your mobo, but the scheme is like this:
The bus has 4 hardware INT (errupt) lines (not to confuse with IRQs), called INT A to INT D. When two busy devices share one INT line to assign IRQ requests, the problem occurs. Your soundcard is sharing an INT line, probably with your S-ATA PCI card.
Refer to the mobo manual to find a PCi slot that shares with a device you don't use or that's less bandwith consuming, maybe with a WiFi device or the LAN. So the problems you were finding in the net were not necessarily due to the S-ATA in particular, but with this INT-thing in general.

There is one more thing that could render the theory above useless: I'm not shure if Audigy cards are as avid on PCI resources as their precessors. That means that a bandwith-hungry S-ATA controller plus the Audigy can have problems, regardless if they share an INT line or not. But try the slot shuffle and maybe it helps. Good luck!