God! I hate the geforce!

[SteveC]

Had my first trouble shooting session with a geforce yesterday... I work in a small computer shop here in the little lump of rock off northern france called england and about a month ago we built a PC with a geforce in it (PIII-450, 128mb, Live! etc). Anyways, it came back yesterday with a prob in Quake3 - flashing textures. Only quake 3 though - quake 2 and every other app/game was perfect.
Well, after trying EVERYTHING, and I mean everything (irqs, drivers, directx, patches, bioses blah blah), guess what it was - it turned out to be that the Abit BE6-II couldn't supply the 8 AMPS that the card needed! 8 bloody amps!? (out of interest, what does the G400 take?) The geforce pulled the 3.3 volts I/O down a bit. Luckily, in abit's bios it is possible to push up the I/O voltage.

Who'd have thunk it, eh?

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Pertti]

Ok Steve,

I do appologize for my comment

[Thundrchez]

Yup, it is getting to the rediculous stage. That's why AGP-pro layout (I think that is correct) is coming out, and that is why the nextgen voodoos have a hard disk power connector on 'em. That is a huge buttload of power. The G400 pulls down its fair share as well, but not that much. Just wait till the G800 or whatever they're gonna call it!

[tuco]

in the latest pc zone there is a pic of the voodoo 6000 & its got an external power supply!, its definately the silly season

[Dyre]

Yeah tuco, but thats old news.

[SteveC]

The stupid thing is, the best part of those 100 watts or so is wasted as HEAT. They should go to .01u NOW!

Pertti, ??? what comment?

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Himself]

Somebody tell Tom's Hardware that it's not just AMD motherboards that have problems with the GeForce.

[paulcs]

I think Thundrchez makes a good point. The Canopus GeForce also has a connector so you can plug it right into the power supply. I've read it makes life a lot easier on people with older motherboards and other power issues.

Unless video board manufacturers find a way to curb the increasing power demands of new cards, I expect (and hope) we'll be seeing more of this.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Jammrock]

Canopus GeForce??? I thought Canopus stopped making video cards.

I wonder how a GeForce will run at AGP 4x on an Athlon board? That would be some serious power drainage

Jammrock

------------------
My computer was working great until my brand new "top-of-the-line" power supply committed ritual suicide, after only 24 hours of use, and took out 2 motherboard (mine and a test board), 2 hard drives and possibly more...a moment of silence please, in rememberance of a valiant computer that served me well.

Sorry, had to vent.

[paulcs]

Canopus continues to make consumer boards for the Japanese market.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[mj12]

SteveC, I'm curious as to how you narrowed it down to this problem. Please detail this. Very Interesting stuff.

[SteveC]

mj12 - well after trying everything I knew of to try to get the card working properly, I was getting pretty desparate and after scouring the net I found some other people had experienced the same thing - it also happens in homeworld, so I'm told.

There's all sorts of articles / postings around commenting on the geforce and power problems. Here's a few:
http://tweak3d.pcstats.com/messagevi...&threadid=1426
http://www.3dspotlight.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000027.html
http://www.rivaextreme.com/reviews/v6600/index4.shtml

Anyway, for me, 3.5v I/O did it!

------------------
Cheers,
Steve

"Life is what we make of it, yet most of us just fake"

[Jammrock]

The 8 amps of power to the video card is fairly interesting. No wonder GeForce cards don't work in Athlon systems. You have the CPU drawing a few amps of power, the video card drawing 8 amps, and then the drives and rest of the system drawing even more...most power supplies aren't even rated to handle more than 10 amps, let alone more.

Hell even my $200 425 W PC Power and Cooling supply is only rated at 15 amps. No wonder the V5/6000 needs an external power supply. Suddenly I think I need a 2000 VA UPS to handle my computer...

Jammrock

------------------
My computer was working great until my brand new "top-of-the-line" power supply committed ritual suicide, after only 24 hours of use, and took out 2 motherboard (mine and a test board), 2 hard drives and possibly more...a moment of silence please, in rememberance of a valiant computer that served me well.

Sorry, had to vent.

[Scout255]

Jammrock: The computer does not just take power off of your 12 Volt powersupply rails.
The motherboard mostly uses the following voltages:
5+ and +3.3
This is why these voltages have HUGE amprage capacities (the pcp&c unit you quoted has a 50 AMP rateing at 5+ and a 40 AMP rateing on 3.3 volt)
that means that 382 Watts of power are allocated to these power rails (which is great in my opinion) The athlon takes about 150 Watt minimum to run on these rails, this powersupply almost doubles that.
The +12 Volt line is basically what powers your fans, cdroms, dvd roms and hard drives.
Most hard drives use anything from 500 ma to 2 Amps.

[Jammrock]

True, but still, 8 amps for the video card, 26 amps for the CPU (54 Watts / 2 Volts), that's a 34 Amp load just from 2 devices. Add in the drives, sound cards, motherboard, RAM, NIC, Modem, case fans (some of us have 8+), the power supply draws it's own current, plus any specialty item such as peltiers, SCSI, multiple HDD's and CD/DVD's... a 250 W supply barely cuts it for a gaming rig anymore. I guess I was quoting the draw from the outlet...my bad.

Plus you want to take into practice that you NEVER push your power supply to its max. If that baby goes out, it takes you entire machine with you (I know this from experience).

With some of the next gen cards you are going to be pushing even more current throught the video cards, thus the idea of a drive connector on the card itself. I bet the G800 and NV15 will both need additional power connectors even if they are produced on a 0.18 micron die.

Jammrock