crashing, power supply?

[Guest]

my system continues to lock up. i've gone over everything and I determined it is my power supply. i have an athlon 900 w/FIC Az11 motherboard, savage 2000 video, 384mb ram, modem, 1 dvd, 1 cdrom, and a usb mouse all connected to a 230 watter. (on the back it says in little small engraved letters, 115/230 so i figure thats what it was.) it locks up every few hours and in like 2 minutes into any 3d game.

I even tried disconnecting power to my cdrom and dvd and then playing and it still locked up. would adding a 300 watt power supply fix it or what? i aint got mucho casho.

 

[Arrow]

As a rule of thumb, I go with at least 300w when using AMD devices. More is always better.

Rob
Please visit <b><A HREF="http://www.ncix.com/shop/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048" target="_new">http://www.ncix.com/shop/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048</A></b>

 

[Guest]

Hi,

First: those small letters 115/230 are not wattage of your power supply - it means that your PS can work on both American(115v) and European(230V) current standart so you probably need to read more carefully label - it should said something like 230W if it is 230watt.
Second: if it is really 230W it will probably be your power supply that cause your problems - just because 230W is too inadequate. Also keep in mind that FIC motherboards require SIGNIFFICANTLY more power than most of the other MB - I had similar problems with FIC SD-11, AZ-11 and AD-11 - none of them wanted to run on my old 250W power supply while 4 different motherboards (EPOX, Abit, Asus and my latest MSI 6341) were running on the same power supply without any problem. Also disconnecting CD/DVD in most cases does not help because they use primarly 12V from your power supply while for stable motherboard operation it is required to have atleast 20A on 5V and summary of ~150W combined on 3.3v & 5v rails. On the label of your power supply there should be writings something like this:
"Maximum current at +5V - 20A (or xxA)"
"Maximum current at +3.3V - 14A (or xxA)"
When you are buying new power supply just look very carefully at those writings - you need atleast 20A at 5v (above 1GHz you probably need 25A as minimum) and at least 14A at 3.3v - try to maximize those two numbers. And keep in mind that some cheap power supply provide big total number of wattage but not adequate 3.3v+5V combined wattage - for example my new power supply (again rated 250W) has 150W total combine output for 3.3v& 5v while many so-called 300W power supply has total combined output less than 150W (sometimes as low as 130W).
One thing that might improve your current stability for the moment is to remove one of your memory chips - RAM also cosumes atleast several watts and is using 3.3V rail.
Hope this help.
Regards,
menads

 

[BrainStorm]

I had similar problems with 1 of my Athlon systems, it was IRQ conflits. Also, make sure you have no heat problems. Latest BIOS can be a good idea too.

Hope that helps.

It's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick!

 

[mjdunn]

FIC AZ11, what os are you running? The FIC AZ11 has known issues with Win98.

96.3 % of Statistics are made up.

 

[crapple0]

I had major problems running a 550 classic athlon, a ddr geforce, 3 harddrives, and 2 cd devices off a 235w power supply. I'd get sporadic lockups, win2k bsod's, usually when taxing the geforce. I got a 300W ($40 from Best Buy if you want it hot'n'now, $25 online), and all my problems went away.

so go get the PSU!

~Crapple0

"the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"