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GeForce Ti4200....350w p/s REQ....will running on 250W p/s HURT?

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amd4evar

Technical User
Sep 15, 2002
2
US
i am running a 250w p/s with a 1.0ghz athlon sdr pc133.

also i have 2 cd drives, a hard drive, a sound card, and a network card.

the requirements are a 350w p/s, but i cant get my hands on a bigger p/s for about a week.

think running it on a 250 will work, and if so, will it damage the rest of the hardware?
 
You are running a risk but I have run more than this on a 250watt supply, make it short term. As long as it doesn't pop it won't damage anything, but if it does it can take out all sorts. Martin Please let members know if there advice has helped any.
 
i've had it in for a while now...seems fine to me....

whats wierd is that only the PNY Verto GeForce4 Ti4200 has the 350w p/s requirement...

the other brands' ti4200s don't have that requirement listed.

could it perhaps be that the company just lists it as a tactic to make people buy more power than they need????
 
No, I guess they are just making a sensible recommendation.
If you have ever had a Power supply pop??? then you will know what I mean, they can and do take out hard drives, motherboards, CPU's, memory etc etc.
Trouble is the PSU is the most vital part in your system and at the same time the most underestimated, a good PSU (Enermax etc) can give you years of rock solid performance where as a generic PSU can give you an unstable flakey system at the very least and make you hate your PC because of it's unreliability.
Because the poor PSU is in the background doing nothing special "it would seem" people cannot grasp the importance of paying possibly 3 times more than generic for a good one.
But experience teachers us lessons and my lesson for the day is: Get a good power supply! sooner rather than "crying in your hands" later. Martin
Please let members know if there advice has helped any.
 
Two things you have to be careful, one is the mainboard, it might fry when they are under heavy load
second is the hard drive might burn out, i had two maxtor went out like that, luckily they were all under warranty

make sure your +5VSB are above 1 Amp, or else everytimes you go to turn the computer on and off, you are asking for trouble, most p4 power supplies requires 2 Amp
so if you happen to purchase new one, get a p4 power supply, then it will be safe for everything
i would get a 450Watts one, especially when you want to add fans to help cool your hardware off
 
PNY is not the only manufacturer to have this requirement warning. Visiontek also states that their GeForce4 products be used in a 250-350w power supply. Many OEM system owners (HP, etc.) cannot get these cards to function without blue screen or no POST because of their low-wattage power supplies. Radeon 8500/9700 users are experiencing the same issues.
 
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