I need some advice.
I have a Gigabyte xxxx nForce 4 Ultra chipset mobo. It has a 24 pins connector on it, but Gigabyte taped over the last 4 pins, so my no name PSU (500W, 12v@34A) could connect its 20 pin connector to it fine.
I have an athlon 3500 90nm, 1 Sata DVD burner, 1 IDE dvd rom, 1 SATA HD, wireless pci network card, audigy 2 pci, Radeon X800XL PCI-E, Thermaltake cooler and 5 case fans in my system.
Looking at the ratings, I would say that 500W plus 34A on the 12V line should be plenty to run this system, right? And yet, I'm having serious stability issues, but absolutely 100% completely random.
I can run games for 6 or 8 hours without any problem at all, and yet at the same time, I'll reboot and run the same games, and they will crash within 15 minutes to 2 hours of playing. My crashes are always hard lockups, although sometimes VPU recover will be able to get the graphics card back.
I'm at a loss whether this is due to a dodgy PSU, or whether this is due to a flaw in my graphics card (my main likely culprit then would seem to be the memory chips on the 256MB card). But one day I think it's this, and the other I'll think it's that.
I ran Doom 3 at Ultra quality, to get those mass textures shoved into my card, and sure enough it crashed within 2 minutes.
But then I tried it again, and it ran fine at Ultra Quality for two whole levels.
In an effort to see if it was power related, I upped the voltages to my CPU by 0.025V and to my PCI-E bus by 0.1V, but that was enough to shut my system down completely, and I had to boot back into BIOS and reduce the voltages again. (And I'm scared to do it again for fear of the system not ever booting again...)
Since ATI is dragging their heels in coming up with any kind of response to my ticket with regards to testing the graphics card, I'll ask here in this thread.
Do you think that this could be power related? If so, what would you recommend would be a good ATX2.0 PS for use in this system? I'm just worried that my current PSU is not getting enough juice to my X800XL due to the fact that it has no molex connector on the card, and that I have no 24 pins connector...
Any advice greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance.
Creston