300 W power supply enough for a Geforce 4200?

[Broncho]

I'm running a Soyo SY-K7V Dragon+ motherboard, I'm utilizing the onboard sound, a Linksys nic, an IBM hard drive, a 3.5" floppy, a Pioneer DVD-ROM, a Lite-On CD-RW, two case fans, a northbridge fan and a cpu fan as well as the 4200. I'm pretty sure I'm running a 300W Enermax power supply (it is what ever came standard in my case) and it is all in an Enlight case (EN-7237OX3C4). I am sure it is a 300 W power supply from the spec. I had a Geforce 3 in there but upgraded this past week because of some problems I had with it. Now I've experienced two random reboots and it is dropping frames and lagging when I'm playing the single player demo for BF1942 and the new BF1942 Secret Weapons but it ran through a mission in Comanche 4 with no problems. Before you start saying it is the blaster virus, I've checked that. I'm running up to date antivirus and it says I'm clean, I downloaded the patch back in July, I have no process running with the name blast in them or any files with the name blast in them on my computer and I also set the RPC to take no action on errors. I'm thinking it is the power supply but I was thinking for as few extra components I have in the system it wouldn't be a problem. What do yall think?

 

[Lenine]

Im running a ti 4200 with a 300 watt startech ps never had a problem.

 

[Regs]

Yes.

 

[Sheriff]

Yes if it is indeed an Enermax

 

[novice]

FWIW, I was running a cheap 320W power supply with my new Shuttle AN35N Nforce 2 board and overclocked XP1700+ and had stability problems, lots of random reboots, and that was with a Geforce 3! Upgrading to an Enlight 420W power supply helped quite a bit, but swapping out out the cheap spektek chip PNY ram for a single stick of Crucial PC-2700 cured it completely. If your current power supply has less than 15A on the 12Volt rail, or a combined 3.3 and 5V of less than 200W, I would suspect the power supply could be the culprit. As in my case, ram could also be a possibility.

 

[Broncho]

I'll have to check the combined amperage for the 3.3 and 5 V. The ram I'm running is Crucial 2100 cas 2.5 (running at cas 2) and wasn't causing any problems before hand. After the second spontaneous reboot I did reseat the ram though. I'm thinking I might try a 350 W power supply first. I am tight on funds right now so I can't really afford to try the guessing game buying new components to fix this. On top of that since it is such a random deal it could be difficult to know if it is fixed. So far it has only happened twice (both times while on the desktop, not while playing games) and the first time was three days after I installed the video card then the next time was approximately 16 hours later, with the system powered down for about 10 of those 16 hours. It ran fine after that yesterday for about 7 hours before I powered the system down. I'm also wondering if it could just be the card itself. Check out this thread over in the video card forum about it. I'm almost positive it has something to do with the card, either the card being bad or the card drawing more power than my power supply can handle, since none of this started until after I had installed the new card. I do have an email into Newegg about the difference in the card apperances but I haven't received a response yet. Anyone think it might just be card?

 

[Broncho]

Ok, I checked the power supply at lunch. According to the sticker on the side of the power supply it is rated at 25A on the +5V rail and 20A on the +3.3V rail. It looks like it is badged as an Enlight power supply model HPC-300-101 although a quick search on google says it is actually a High Power power supply with an Enlight rebadging. I don't know anything about High Power power supplies. Are they considered a "good" power supply manufacturer and would you think that it would still provide enough power for this card?

 

[Broncho]

Ok, I just re-read some of these posts and realized I didn't answer all the questions, even for myself. On further review the 3.3 V and 5 V rails max at 180 W. After doing some checking on MSI's VGA forums they also recommend at least 28 A on the 3.3 V rail so it looks like my power supply doesn't have enough power for the card. Anyone agree or am I completely wrong in this?

 

[novice]

Originally posted by: Broncho
Ok, I just re-read some of these posts and realized I didn't answer all the questions, even for myself. On further review the 3.3 V and 5 V rails max at 180 W. After doing some checking on MSI's VGA forums they also recommend at least 28 A on the 3.3 V rail so it looks like my power supply doesn't have enough power for the card. Anyone agree or am I completely wrong in this?

You are probably on the edge of your 300W PS capability. I have been pretty happy with the enlight 420W power supplies. They too, are manufactured by High Power. They are good quality power supplies, and are offered under the Enlight, Thermaltake, and Chieftec badges. The 300W PSU's were okay for the early systems with P3's and the early Athlons, but with DDR ram, new power draining video cards and ever bigger faster hard drives, most have moved to a 350W PSU as minimum and 400W as a good base. (as long as they are quality power supplies, they work fine.) I would be very confident with a quality 350W or better Sparkle, Fortran, Antec or Enermax or one of the High Power made Enlights, Thermaltakes or Chieftecs for your system, but would opt for a 400W or better for future upgradability.

 

[Broncho]

Thanks for the post novice. I really wasn't planning on doing much upgrading to this system for a while when I built it last year. I knew by the time I had money to do a major upgrade it would be time to start over so I only really looked at expansion in the ram and hard drive area. I guess that came back to bite me. I'll definitely take your suggestion under consideration about the 400W power supply. It will probably come out to what ever I can afford at the time.

Thanks for everybody's help.