gfx / psu issues ?

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Joined
16 Nov 2005
Posts
111
hey all

I'm having a few issues and i'm after some advice.

around 2 years ago i decided to rebuild a 3 year old alienware desktop. I kept the 750W PSU (unbranded from what i could see) and hardrive and brought an overclockers bundle consisting of a sandybridge I5, 8 gig ram and an asus p8z68-v mb o/c'ed to 4.6. I also added a SSD and a gtx560ti.

Aside from some stability issues with the overclock that the kind fellas at oc support helped me solve all has been good for the past couple of years.

Like most people i used BF4 as an excuse to upgrade my graphics card and brought a R9 290.

problem 1 - when i went to replace the gfx card i noticed that my psu only has a pair of 6 pin pcie power connectors and the new card needed a 6 and an 8.

Helpfully the card came with a molex to 8pin connector, which dubious as it looked, i thought i'd use and a stop gap while i waited for a 6 to 8 pin cable to turn up :eek:.

I reassembled the machine installed a clean copy of win 7 and to be fair everything ran fine in bf4.

Problem 2 - I thought i'd try another game to benchmark the card so using company of heroes 2 in the benchmark mode I ran it only to have the computer shutdown and upon trying to restart i was greeted by a lovely little message telling me the "OS could not be found press any key" - at which point i promptly **** myself

The computer, after sodding about and booting via the bios, loaded into windows fine and everything seemed to function so i figured I hadnt fried anything.

I eventually sorted the missing os message by reinstalling windows and again everything was hunky dory. I figured that it was down to the dodgy molex connector i was using, however bf4 was playable and i had no issues for the next few days

today the 6-8 pin cable turned up so removed the molex and used the 2nd 6pin power lead and after checking everything booted ok settled down to pass some time with bf4.

At this point it occured to me that i was running on the stock profile and not the o/c one, and had been since i replaced the card. :rolleyes:

After checking in cpu-z that this was indeed the case, i loaded the correct profile at which point i hit problem 3 - as soon as I got in game I got a BSOD. :mad:

Figuring that maybe the PSU wasnt man enough i reloaded the optimised defaults as it had been working fine at the stock speeds, I got in game only to have it shutoff of after a couple of minutes playing - not good, not good at all :mad:

so my question is, are my problems down to the PSU? or is there something more deeper at fault, if it is the PSU anyone have any recommendations?

and why was everything working fine when using the molex to 8 pin, but i have nothing but issues now i'm using the 2nd pcie cable.

Apologies for the rambling post but the gf is watching crap on tv and I'm bored not actually having anything to use my nice shiny gfx card on. ;)

Fritzo
 
Even if it isn't the psu I would still change it. A cheap power supply may not have enough juice on the 12v rail to run your setup.
 
Agree about the unbranded psu, you can imagine my surprise when I stripped down the Alienware machine to find it in there - so much for only using the highest quality components

One thing I don't get all the suggestions for psu's, which are appreciated by the way, are for 550 to 650 W yet the one in there is rated at 750W? What happened over the years has the quality of power delivery reduced consumption or is purely down to the higher efficiencys of the modern psu's?

Fritzo
 
Agree about the unbranded psu, you can imagine my surprise when I stripped down the Alienware machine to find it in there - so much for only using the highest quality components

One thing I don't get all the suggestions for psu's, which are appreciated by the way, are for 550 to 650 W yet the one in there is rated at 750W? What happened over the years has the quality of power delivery reduced consumption or is purely down to the higher efficiencys of the modern psu's?

Fritzo

It might be rated at 750W, but it won't deliver anywhere near that. The Seasonic 550W psu above will deliver 540W and 45amps on the 12v rail.

What spec is your pc ? Normally if you are only running a single gpu then you shouldn't need a 750w psu.
 
see this is what is concerning me, for 4 days or so everything was fine when the cpu was running at stock speed and the GPU was powered from a 6 pin PCIE and a molex converter, why am I now having issues?

specs are as follows

I5 2500k @ 4.6 (at least it was)
Asus P8Z68-V
8gb Kingston Hyper X
R9-290
crucial m4 64gb
250gb Seagate or something similar hard drive
LG BD Optical drive
750W PSU
 
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