Power Supply the Problem?

[johntx2001]

I recently installed a 7300GT PCI-Express Video card and suddenly my PC locks on bootup at the main Windows Screen. The blue scrolling bars below the logo scroll through and then stop and the system is frozen. I installed another new video card and had the same problem. I had a 600W power supply and put in a new 650W and the same problem occurred. However, if I unplug one or more of the DVD drives, the system will boot normally and is stable. My question is, from anyone's experiences, does this look to be a power supply problem? It seems as if I have fewer peripherals plugged in, the problem is alleviated so I thought maybe I wasn't getting enough amps on my 12V rails. My next thought is to go with the Thermaltake 750W power supply with 4 12V rails and 30amps 3.3V

System:

Athlon 4200 X2
7300GT Video Card
1 DVD drive
2 DVD +/- RW
3 Hard Drives (non-array)
2 case fans

Thanks to anyone for their help!

 

[felixc]

With such a power supply you could afford the most power guzzling video cards with no problem.

The DVD drives don't share a single bit with a video card. So I doubt that this is a problem between the mobo and the video card. And since the graphics are okay when you remove a drive, that comforts this theory. Could it be that the interrupt resources aren't shared properly by the drivers?

When the PC boots, before it loads the OS it will usually list the PCI devices and the IRQ lines that are used for these devices. The ideal situation is of course one IRQ per device.

Can you check in your BIOS settings if you can disable the peripherals that you do not use. Like the serial ports, the LPT port, maybe even the PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports. Some motheboards will let the BIOS reallocate the IRQs of these peripherals to PCI devices.

If you have PCI cards in the system, sometimes moving then to another PCI slot will let the BIOS reshuffle the IRQ allocations.

 

[johntx2001]

Thanks for the input! I tried what you said to no avail. New 600W power supply was working (Windows was booting) but today it locked up like before. I'm contemplating putting in the 750W just to see if it's a power issue since there are 3 DVD drives and 3 hard drives. A tech said it's probably the motherboard. Said it wasn't getting enough juice to power up the devices. So ... now I'm debating between yet another new power supply or getting a new motherboard.

 

[G0AOZ]

From what you've told us so far, I doubt it's a PSU issue. DVDs don't take that much power, and 3 HDDs drawing current from a 600 Watter ought to hardly make it bat an eyelid. However, to make sure why not run some tests at the DOS level with all the drives connected up.

Maybe there's a conflict with the video card chipset and the motherboard. Tried different video drivers? What about your mobo BIOS? Later version available perhaps? Run MEMTEST86 to make sure it's not a RAM issue...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[johntx2001]

Well you're right. Definitely not the power supply. Installed the 750W Thermaltake and had the same problem. The mb chipset and the video card chip is NVidia, so should be a conflict there. I'll try replacing the motherboard now. The only thing I can think of is that there was a screw lodged behind my motherboard when all these problems started happening, so maybe the motherboard got shorted out somehow? Oh well ... off to Fry's .....

 

[johntx2001]

Installed a new motherboard and had the same problem, so now I'm looking at putting in a different hard drive, reformatting and reinstalling WinXP and seeing if that's the problem. After all this, would be ironic if it was just a failing hard drive.

 

[Aussie2]

You could also check jumper settings on the dvd drives assuming their not sata drives