Fluctuating 5V Rail

[sfanous]

Hi

2 days ago I started benchmarking my system. I used SiSoft Sandra's Environment Monitor Wizard together with Prime95. On my first run of Prime95 it errored after just under 5 hours.

Thinking it might be my Corsair XMS3200 XL-PRO RAM running at stock timings of 2-2-2-5, I ran memtest86 for 5 hours and it ran without a glitch so that ruled out the possibility of faulty RAM.

Next I decided to rerun the same test above and closely watch the Environment Monitor.
Prime95 ran for just under 10 hours as shown here
The final output of Sandra's Environment Monitor Wizard is here

As you can see the numbers are not all too great mainly starting from above the Power / AUX Temperature, +5V Voltage and +12V Voltage.

The CPU Temperature which is not shown never rose over 37C.

To begin with the Power / AUX Temperature is always between 69C and 71C. I did some research and found out that not all mainboard manufacturers allow you to even read the PSU temperature, so that the number SiSoft Sandra was reporting could be incorrect. For this issue I would really appreciate it if a K8NXP-SLI owner could check out what their Power / AUX Temperature is using SiSoft Sandra and report back to me.

P.S. The Power / AUX Temperature is also reported as 70C using SpeedFan and Motherboard Monitor.

Moving on, the +5V Voltage is what hit me. It fluctuated between 1.26V-6.18V :Q. Now this surely is something to worry about. Can someone please tell me what peripherals draw power from the +5V rail given that my system is heavily loaded (Running a 3500+ Winchester at stock cooled using a Zalman CNPS7000B-ALCU, 1024 Corsair XMS3200 XL-PRO at stock, BFG 6800GT at factory stock which is already overclocked by BFG, 2 Optical Drives, 1 80GB Samsung IDE HD, 1 200GB WD SATA HD, 1 74GB WD Raptor SATA HD, 5 Coolmaster Case fans, 2 cathodes, 1 Creative SB Live! Gamer plus the 3 fans in the PSU.

I need to try and disconnect some peripherals that are drawing power from the +5V Rail, but I need to know which ones are drawing power from it.

Finally concerning the +12V Rail, the numbers are not too bad given that the average was 11.60V.

I forgot to mention, that other than those reported issues, I have not been experiencing any instability such as BSOD except at the begining and that turned out being a known messed up Iomega Driver.

Thanks for anyone who will help

Regards

 

[sfanous]

Anyone please?

 

[Killrose]

CPU

 

[arswihart]

USB i think

 

[Killrose]

Up until most recently the +5 volt line powered the CPU ,that is why the AMP rating on the +5 is so high if you read the PSU side panel sticker. Now most modern motherboards supplement the +5 with +12 to supply extra juice to modern CPU's.

Your motherboard is either reporting the +5 wrong, or it is really that bad, and the supplemented power from the +12 is keeping the system from crashing. The motherboard regulates the power the CPU actually gets, so its posible it could have bad +5 regulation.

I am not an expert on this so dont take it as word. My guess is your +5 is not that bad or you would be having real problems. However, you might be having them in the near future

 

[FastEddie]

Take a look here---> Power requirements

You left out the most important piece of information. What power supply are you using?

 

[sfanous]

Vantec Stealth 520W

I think I need to get a multimeter and measure the voltages myself. I almost disconnected everything and got the same results. Plus different peices of software are reporting different values for the 5V

 

[dark fiber]

I ran the prime95 torture test along with the SiSoft Environment monitor and when I woke up this morning it was on a BSOD screen that said something to the effect that the system was shut down because of a problem and the error was...

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

It said to restart my PC if that was the first time (this is a new machine BTW) if it happened before to try a few things like checking for new drivers etc...

Has anyone seen that before?

 

[sfanous]

What driver caused the error?

 

[dark fiber]

The driver was "nvatabus.sys" I ran prime95 again and it BSODed again with the same error. I know "nvatabus.sys" is the NVIDIA IDE driver right? Any ideas on what I should do?

 

[dark fiber]

UPDATE: I installed the ATA Driver that Gigabyte has here...

http://www.giga-byte.com/Motherboard/Support/Driver/Driver_GA-K8NXP-SLI.htm

Which appears to be older than the current driver that comes with the nforce4 standalone pack nvidia.com has on their site. I have been running prime95 so far for over 6 hours and it is still running fine.

 

[The Pentium Guy]

Bump for sfanous

 

[rise]

Originally posted by: The Pentium Guy
Bump for sfanous

yeah, that was some threadjacking.

OP you really do need a multi to get some proper reads.

regarding that table someone linked on what uses what rail, i thought vga cards used 12 and 5? also, my pci-e connector appears to be strictly 12v.