Advice on PSU and mobo voltages

[kevinpray]

:frown:

Hi all,

I have a power supply unit question that I hope someone can give me a good answer. I am running a GA-8INXP with a Radeon 9700 Pro. I have run into the dreaded "thread stuck in driver" issue and thanks to some good advice, I was able to resolve it by upping the memory and AGP voltages by 0.1V. I have a 3.06 P4, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, a CD-RW drive, a 250M zip drive, 2 15G Deskstars in a RAID config, SBLive and PCI modem, 1G DDR RAM. No overclocking. 3 80mm fans.

One piece of advice was to check the voltage on the +3.3 line. I have a 450W Antec PSU and I consistently get +3.2V when the machine is idle or doing light work and it goes down to 3.14 - 3.18 under a heavier load. Even with the sag on the line, I am not experiencing any more "stuck in thread" problems.

My question is this -- should I get a heftier power supply (looking an the Enermax 550W) with 36A on the 3.3 line? I'd rather spend the $$ on a better PSU than risk damaging my other components with the increased voltage and having to replace them.

Any thoughts and advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Kevin

The HIGHLY TECHNICAL forum is not for troubleshooting or purchase advice. Please post in the appropriate category.

AnandTech Moderator

 

[CTho9305]

If it isn't crashing and your power supply isn't melting, I wouldn't bother. Anandtech members like to go overboard on power supplies for some reason.

 

[rjain]

The voltage is probably not over-spec, it's probably going back into spec because you boosted the target voltage, which was being under-shot. Less than 3.2V is pretty bad, IMHO. I'd check out the recent update of the PSU shootout and choose one with a good amount of juice on the 3.3V line as well as a good actual-to-theoretical combined voltage. I've been looking at those Zalman/Sparkle PSUs myself.

 

[Amorphus]

this isn't highly technical, either. this should go in General Hardware.