Enough power

[Oz3050]

I just got a new motherboard, video card, and power supply but im having some weird behavior trying to get everything working and im wondering if it's a power problem. The power supply is an Antech TruePower Trio TP3-650. Video card is a a GeForce 8800GTX. Other components are MSI P35 Platinum, Pentium 805D, X-Fi soundcard, one hard drive and currently no DVD drives. I also have a Koolance Exos2 that's not powering up with the rest of the computer. Sometimes the fans will start but no water pump or lights. When i power on everything starts for a split second then shuts off then finally starts up a few seconds later. I'll get no video out unless i have just reset the BOIS. Do i kneed a different power supply with more amps? It's been a while since i've upgraded so im a little behind on the power requirements for the new high end PCI-E cards. Thanks for your help!

 

[Gneisenau]

That should be enough power. That power supply has 3 12V rails. Their website doesn't tell me how many watts per rail. You may need to contact them and find out. It's possible that your 8800gtx is overrunning one rail. Also, make sure all the power connectors are connected to your PS. (all on your MB and video card.)

It's also possible you have a bad PS, or one of your new components is bad and causing a short to take place.

Since you state you replaced your MB, I would check it carefully to make sure one of the standoffs isn't shorting out a component on the MB. I've seen that happen a few times.

 

[John]

Originally posted by: Gneisenau
That should be enough power. That power supply has 3 12V rails. Their website doesn't tell me how many watts per rail. You may need to contact them and find out. It's possible that your 8800gtx is overrunning one rail.

While the Seasonic-built Trio claims to have 3 rails, there is no OCP so it's actually a single rail psu.

The easiest way to find out if you have a psu problem is to use a known good psu to test the system.

 

[Oz3050]

I tried putting my old system back together with an older PSU (Thermaltake PurePower 480-AD) and that only has one rail i think and everything seemed pretty normal with the 8800GTX, although i didn't use it too long, and the motherboard was also only PCI-E 4x. With the new system and PSU i need to reset the BIOS before i start it otherwise it will power on for a couple seconds, then shut off for a few, then turn back on, and it keeps doing that and there's no video. Dunno what the BIOS has to do with that. And no matter what i do, when i power it on for the first time it turns on, cuts off, then starts back up again and goes to the BIOS if i had just reset it.

 

[John]

I wanted you to try the old psu on the new system. 😕 However since you have your old system together hook the Trio up to it and see what happens. Now try the PurePower on the new system and see what happens.

 

[Oz3050]

Oh yeah, the Trio was hooked up and everything seemed alright. By alright i mean it booted into windows, installed the GTX drivers then i started working back again on the new system. The old PSU is only 20-pin ATX and has no 8-pin CPU connector so i can't use it on the new motherboard, which is why i bought a new PSU to begin with. Windows won't boot up with the new system but that's sorta expected with a new motherboard. Im having trouble locating a WinXP disc so i can't reinstall yet. But the power cutting on and off on the new system is pretty weird. Could the mobo be bad?

 

[John]

At least we can rule out the psu at this point. 🙂 How about you strip the new system down to the cpu and the new Trio psu. Does it power up the first time and beep? If so put one stick of ram in and power it up again. Does it still beep? If so put the 8800GTX in and power it up. What happens?

 

[Oz3050]

With just the PSU and CPU i get no beeps, and it does the weird power on as soon as i hit the button, shut off, then start back up again. The MSI P35 mobo has some LEDs on it, red, red, green, red starting from top. Manual says it hangs at those colors if no memory is detected, which is good since none are in. (and this is probably moving my topic out of the power supply realm). So now when i powered down, and put one stick of memory in it powered on, showed red, green, green, red (processor initializing), then shut off after about 5 seconds and turned back on and repeated that cycle. So now after i hit the BIOS clear button it powered on, beeped many time at different tones and intervals (too much to tell what it means). And now the lights are green, green, red, green (initializing floppy) and hangs there. So now the video card. Put it in, started it up, displayed the BIOS logo. Told me clock wasn't right and F1 for setup and F2 for load defaults. I hit F2 and told me Bootable media not found (i have no HDD in) hit ctrl+alt+del and i thought it restarted but i lost all display (monitor light still green) and the BOIS stopped at all red (CPU damaged or not installed properly). Restarted manually and ended up stuck at the same spot. Now i took the video card back out and stops at red, red, green, green (decompressing BIOS to RAM for fast booting), with a beep about every 20 seconds. That's enough for this post. Gonna put the video card back in and see. I'd like to be able to get to the BIOS consistently start-up/restart, is that too much to ask???

 

[Oz3050]

So i may have found my problem. The default BIOS is an FSB of 200Mhz and 20x for 4Ghz. But my CPU is an 805D 2.66Ghz dual core. The lowest FSB is 200 and lowest multiplier is 14x for 2.8Ghz. Do i have a mobo that doesn't support the CPU at the default speeds? I had the 805D overclocked to 2.84 in my old system but right now it seems to not want to boot at 2.8Ghz.