• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

PSU not strong enough for 7900GT core?

Associate
Joined
24 Jun 2004
Posts
1,995
I currently own a Gainward 7800GS+, and after sending it to OcUK and they are saying they cannot find a fault, the only thing that I have not ruled out, and not even thought about, was my PSU.

Its currently a 480W Tagan, and was bought quite a while ago now. I have an ABIT IC-7 Max 3 board, which might require more power than most due to there OTES feature and all there other unique-brand features. I also overclock my P3.2E Prescott from 3.2 to 3.5 which might draw more power than at stock, cooled with SI-120 & Akasa Amber 120mm fan.

I also have 1 x SATA 320GB, 1 x IDE 80GB, 2 x 1gb Corsair RAM, Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music, 1 x DVD-R Drive, 1 x CD-RW Drive, as well as several USB Ports.

With all that in mind, am I not getting enough power to my Graphics card, enough to stop it from functioning properly?

If that might be the case then would a more powerful PSU solve all the problems that have been occuring, and stop any lock-ups etc?
 
That PSU should be enough, the 7900 series don't use too much power. This sounds like a typical case of 7900 death to me, there's been loads of it around. Got a friend you can borrow a psu from?
 
Unfortunatly I dont have a friend that would lend me one so it would be more like a shot in the dark as to whether it would work or not.

I would have thought that it would be the 7900 sudden death, but I have send it back to OcUK twice to have a look at it, and now they are sending me back the same one for the second time, so if there machines can run it perfectly fine, it must be something to do with my machine.

This was suppost to be the card to make my machine play everything that I would wish to play for at least another year, but instead it has caused me nothing but headaches :(
 
Even with all those disk drives that PSU should still be acceptable.

Any chance you can try that card in a different machine?
 
I dont really know of anyone elses machine that I can try it in as most have a PCI-e machine now so that leaves me a bit isolated and now I dont know what I am doing wrong as to be experiencing all these faults. As I say, the only reason that I have found would be my PSU as that might be what is causing all the lock-ups & freezing etc when I try to play games with it.

I did hear of one person that upgraded there PSU from what I have to a slightly larger 580w and that supposedly solved there problems, I think it also included a PCI-e connector making the need for the 2 x molex converter not required, which is what I think might be a bit of a weak point for it as well.

I just wish that an OcUK engineer could sit at my machine and then see all the problems I am experiencing my end, as at there end all appears to be fine 2 out of 3 times that I have sent it back, and I really cannot afford to send it back again unless I am guaranteed to get a brand new card as it costs a lot when it comes back to me as "no fault found"

Maybe someone here has a sure-fire solution for me?
 
danceMB said:
Is that true? I thought that Tagan was heavily recommended?

It is really, the seasonic, OCZ, and enermax comment is simply stating the best 3 brands. There's nothing particularly flaky about tagan, Hiper maybe, Q-TEC definitely, but not Tagan. Just to make sure, check the voltages while at idle and load using speedfan.
 
Hello again:)

I had the same PSU as I mentioned in the other thread, and I had the same troubles with OcUK sending it back as not faulty, when I called up the only conclusion was maybe the PSU, I bought the 580w tagan PSU (same one they used at OcUK to test it apparently) and it now runs perfectly.

As lots of people have said, there should be no reason the Tagan shouldn't run it, but in my case it didn't, don't know why!

Lots of people may post saying its not the psu, but I just thought oh well, I had wasted this much money (as my pc had a problem a while back, 2 hard drives died, 1 gig of ram passed away and the old card had gone to a place of rest and I had replaced it all), I just bought the PSU as well.

As soon as the new psu was in and connected up (much easier than the old Tagan as well I might add as nearly all the cables apart from a few are optional to plug in so you plug in the ones you need for mobo, hard drives and gfx cards etc) and it worked 100%.

Not that I can say this is your problem, but just from experience it's what happened to me :)

Good luck solving the problem anyway, I'm glad I got it working as it's made a huge difference to the 6800gt I had before (and the dual dvi out is handy as well!).
 
Think i've mentiond this on your other thread. Im running the same gfx card on Hiper-type R 480w psu with stuff listed on sig, no problems except one map on Battlefield 2 seems to freak out and draws weird on occasion. Other than that runs every high end game no issues, one can only assume its your psu failing. :)
 
This is something that I really did want to hear about as I did wonder if it was my PSU as that was the only weak spot that I could think it might have been.

What Tagan model did you use? I have had a look on the products page here and there are 2 different 580W Tagan models, or doesnt it really matter whivh 1 of the 2? Hopefully if I did buy that Tagan model everything would work perfectly well like it should always be.

At least with the new PSU I wouldnt have to worry about molex converters seeing as it has a PCI-e connector as standard :rolleyes:
 
Hello,

Tagan TG580-U15 580W ATX2.01 Easycon SLi Compliant Modular Silent PSU (CA-009-TG) is the one I got.

Hope it solves your problems, if not you can always sell it on ebay and should get most of your money back :)
 
Im just so glad that you had a look at this forum as the problems that you have been explaining seem to be a carbon copy of what was happening to me, just the benefit was that you managed to find a solution to the problem, and if it wasnt for you I would be in a depressed mood, not knowing the solution.

I have ordered that Tagan 580W now, was tempted at that one as it has gold connectors which should help everything that bit more. I think it is IT man time to come over and disconnect the old one and put the new one in for me, something I wouldnt want to do myself.

Hopefully by the end of the week I should be one happy chappy ;)
 
PSU - UPDATE!!!

I have just had the new PSU installed and I have had a chance to do all the tests with my graphics card again, and I am pleased to say it all works perfectly fine!

I will now know to give people guidance for next time if someone else has the same problem as I had.

It seems weird that a 480W PSU would cause all those lock-ups, pixels and errors, but it has and the upgrade to the 580W has solved all problems straight away!

So, I would like to say a very BIG thankyou to "MrMagoo" for basically solving the problem for me that I had, I wouldnt have done it without him.

Bring on the new games! :D
 
Odd, my generic 400w PSU runs the rig in my sig perfectly.

Had trouble with Tagan in the past though *cough 3 blowing up on booting the PC cough*
 
I dont know why I had to do it as it ran my 6800 Ultra perfectly, but maybe the molex converter didnt work right, when this new one has the connection for it, but whatever, it works fine now.

As for your previous Tagan's blowing up, I heard from a very reliable source that about 12-18 months ago they had quite a bad reputation for there PSU's not being reliable etc, but now they have improved in every area and are now one of the best qulaity ones you can ask for.

The cost is very expensive, but as they say, you get what you pay for
 
Still got a blown up Tagan PSU was the 3rd one that blown on startup.

Don't wanna go with them again I just don't intend to risk it.
 
I can understand if you would not want to go near one of those again, but ever since I bought the first Tagan, they have worked perfectly for me, but had to upgrade due to not enough power to the gfx, and now runs everything flawlessly.

They did say that the earlier 480W models had a fault where they would all go bang! but then everything has now been fixed, so if you did come back to the land of Tagan, you would not be disappointed ;)
 
Back
Top Bottom