You know how it is... the money's in the bank and you just want to buy the gear and start using it. No worries, been mucking around with PCs for years so that and a bit of commonsense will see me through.
Wrong! The combination of the Antec P182 case, an Enermax Liberty 620W PSU, an Asus P5N32-E SLI m/board, an 8800GTX card and a copy of Vista Ultimate was all it took to teach me a few lessons.
With the Antec case needing the PSU fitted in it's own chamber at the bottom, the additional 12V ATX lead from the Enermax simply wouldn't reach the socket at the top edge of the m/board, no way, no how. In the end I had to splice in an extra 3 inches of cable to make it reach. Not pretty but it worked.
Soon had Vista loaded and got a reasonable 5.3 on the performance score, so time to load up 3dMark. The results were quite frankly yawnworthy. My 7600GT equiped AMD X2 5600 could do better, but I put this down to it still being early days for the nVIDIA Vista drivers. A couple of months ticked by and I got more and more frustrated with Vista eventually getting so sick of it that 2 weeks ago I hosed the machine and loaded Windows XP. Having installed the latest 8800GTX drivers for XP I was greeted with a message from the nVIDIA System Sentinel telling me that my GPU wasn't getting sufficient power and that it was basically under-clocking the card until I did something about it. Both PCI-E connectors were attached to the card properly so I had to assume that the Enermax 620W PSU wasn't up to it and that the Vista drivers don't tell you there's a problem.
This morning I took the plunge and bought a Thermaltake ToughPower 850W PSU having checked out the nVIDIA's recommended PSU list. Got it home, and replaced the Enermax (which is being relegated to a server I'm building). First up, the 12V ATX lead is easily long enough to reach without resorting to wire-strippers and a soldering iron! Secondly the nVIDIA Sentinel isn't complaining about my GPU being short on power any more. What's more, the Thermaltake PSU is much quieter than the Enermax was.
In future I'll take more advice first!
Wrong! The combination of the Antec P182 case, an Enermax Liberty 620W PSU, an Asus P5N32-E SLI m/board, an 8800GTX card and a copy of Vista Ultimate was all it took to teach me a few lessons.
With the Antec case needing the PSU fitted in it's own chamber at the bottom, the additional 12V ATX lead from the Enermax simply wouldn't reach the socket at the top edge of the m/board, no way, no how. In the end I had to splice in an extra 3 inches of cable to make it reach. Not pretty but it worked.
Soon had Vista loaded and got a reasonable 5.3 on the performance score, so time to load up 3dMark. The results were quite frankly yawnworthy. My 7600GT equiped AMD X2 5600 could do better, but I put this down to it still being early days for the nVIDIA Vista drivers. A couple of months ticked by and I got more and more frustrated with Vista eventually getting so sick of it that 2 weeks ago I hosed the machine and loaded Windows XP. Having installed the latest 8800GTX drivers for XP I was greeted with a message from the nVIDIA System Sentinel telling me that my GPU wasn't getting sufficient power and that it was basically under-clocking the card until I did something about it. Both PCI-E connectors were attached to the card properly so I had to assume that the Enermax 620W PSU wasn't up to it and that the Vista drivers don't tell you there's a problem.
This morning I took the plunge and bought a Thermaltake ToughPower 850W PSU having checked out the nVIDIA's recommended PSU list. Got it home, and replaced the Enermax (which is being relegated to a server I'm building). First up, the 12V ATX lead is easily long enough to reach without resorting to wire-strippers and a soldering iron! Secondly the nVIDIA Sentinel isn't complaining about my GPU being short on power any more. What's more, the Thermaltake PSU is much quieter than the Enermax was.
In future I'll take more advice first!
