Next Time you Think of Upgrading your HD think about the PS

[bryan1]

Hiya Guys,
Well today I decided to put that 120gig HD into my 5 yr old puter only to find the puter didnt work anymore . It turned out my 250 watt PS couldn't handle the power and blew the mobo, graphic's card and the whole shebang. Anyway after a trip to our local puter guy I ended up after $450 getting a 1.7 gig P4 puter. I'm finding with only 512 meg of ram this puter is slower than a 386 but hopefully another gig or so of ram should help. Now winblows in their wisdom decided the pre-installed xp home edition is newer than my xp -pro legal disk so it wont do the upgrade.

Well I suppose the best outcome is I can upgrade this puter to a 3 gig cpu so it aint that old.

Cheers Bryan

 

[HiTech]

Hiya Guys,
Well I suppose the best outcome is I can upgrade this puter to a 3 gig cpu so it aint that old.

But it's still a P4 regardless of it's speed. Even though I'm a fan of the P4, the Core 2 and Quad CPUs run circles around it.
How exactly did a PSU fry enough to take everything else with it? A good number of PSUs have current limiting as well as the standard fuse(s). WIthout good current limiting, voltage regulation could end up being off spec. Are you sure the new MOBO is designed to handle a fast 3G CPU? That's a big jump from 1.7G.

 

[Sceadwian]

Almost the same thing happened to me a ways back. Put a new motherboard/cpu/vid card in an old case without checking the power supply, the PSU blew on power up and took out the video card. The PSU is the most overlooked portion of the computer, and probably one of the most important. It's hard to find a good reputable maker of high quality power supplies at a decent price though, if you want high power and real solid long lasting supplies they cost a bit. Raw wattage isn't always a good selector in power supplies either as it depends on what rail the power is being drawn from.

 

[3v0]

Sceadwian has it right. Always check the supply prior to upgrade.

When I collected the parts for my current PC one of the members here pointed me to a place that had open box power supplies. I purchased a nice 450 watt (with the amps where it counts for the current processors) for 1/2 the going price. Same deal on the case.

 

[bryan1]

Well guy's with this nu puter the power draw is still the same on the RE array, I suppose with these newer puters they only draw what they need. The thing I really like about this nu puter is the bios can handle booting of 5 seperate HD's or usb etc. Now what I found today by putting in a extra 512meg of ram the system info only shows 512 of ram but the device manager shows 1 gig. One wonders if this is a ploy by microsucks to get you to buy more ram. I have a good mate over in the US who I let in to look via VNC and his report was yes you have 1gig of ram built might take awhile for winblows to see it.

NOW GO FIGURE is winblows all they say it cracks up to be.........


NOTE I have edited this thread twice in 5 minutes so what happaned to the 15minute edit ban ?

 

[UTMonkey]

I find it a bit suspect that a HDD could blow a PSU (which in turn fries everything else)

As for the RAM install, what does the BIOS report as far as memory size? have you been in the BIOS since installing the RAM?

Regards

Mark

 

[bryan1]

But it's still a P4 regardless of it's speed. Even though I'm a fan of the P4, the Core 2 and Quad CPUs run circles around it.
How exactly did a PSU fry enough to take everything else with it? A good number of PSUs have current limiting as well as the standard fuse(s). WIthout good current limiting, voltage regulation could end up being off spec. Are you sure the new MOBO is designed to handle a fast 3G CPU? That's a big jump from 1.7G.

Well considering my ol' puter was 5 years old and had leaky caps it still worked fine but the noisy fan was the $600 64 meg graphics card. suppose it was the dust holding everything together. Now speaking of proccessor speed my good mate did say your mobo can handle 4gig of ram and it's that what gives you speed not proccessor numbers. So why are people going for dual/quad cores just to run winblws bloatware in my opnion. I am looking at getting a reduntant quad 2.4 gig xeon just to power my cnc in the shed for a pittance.

 

[Sceadwian]

Make sure you have the RAM in the right sockets, various motherboards can be extremely picky about what types of memory are in what sockets. Some have rules for single/double sided memory sticks in different slots having to be in a specific order, you may need to swap the memory sticks or skip one of the slots to put the extra DIMM in a separate bank. You usually want that anyways as decent motherboards (even older ones) will run the memory in dual channel mode effectively doubling the bandwidth. My motherboard does all of these things, only two banks but three DIMMS very picky.

 

[HiTech]

Well considering my ol' puter was 5 years old and had leaky caps it still worked fine but the noisy fan was the $600 64 meg graphics card. Good Lord! $600 for a crappy 64meg video card? You must've have bought it when it was still being prototyped!

Now speaking of proccessor speed my good mate did say your mobo can handle 4gig of ram and it's that what gives you speed not proccessor numbers. So why are people going for dual/quad cores just to run winblws bloatware in my opnion. Us tweakers don't run bloatware --- non-techy folks like my in-laws do! The dual core CPU provide a much higher Level 2 cache for one thing. The internal memory architecture of the AMD Phenom is even better. My mobo can handle 8gigs of DDR2 and yes the extra amount of ram should speed up general tasks, but there is still a very real need for having a fast CPU as well.
I am looking at getting a reduntant quad 2.4 gig xeon just to power my cnc in the shed for a pittance.

As for your question on where the extra 512Mb of memory disappeared to, since you are running WinXP the memory is there but allocated elsewhere. Below is a cut 'n paste from Corsair's support page:

Q » I have 4GB of Corsair Memory (or more) installed on my machine but I see less than that in my operating system.
A » This is a limitation of a 32-bit operating system. In Windows, the Windows memory manager is limited to a 4 GB physical address space. Most of that address space is filled with RAM, but not all of it. Memory-mapped devices (such as your video card) will use some of that physical address space, as will the BIOS ROMs. After all the non-memory devices have had their say, there will be less than 4GB of address space available for RAM below the 4GB physical address boundary.

MacOS X Tiger and Leopard are both 64-bit operating systems and will not experience this problem. Neither will 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Vista.

 

[arrie]

As far as how much memory to bump in your PC, if you run Win-XP, don't bother with anything above 2GB, Windows is actually slower with more than 2GB.
When installing RAM of different vendors, this can be risky, as some does not support certain RAS & CAS timing values, that can cause havoc, I don't know how critical this is with newer DDR2/3, but seen many PC not wanting to run DDR400 at 400MHz without blue-screening, and then only runs @ DDR333.
This especially sucks on AMD machines, since part of the AMD strong suit is its on-die memory controller.
Bryan, your PSU was probably, giving trouble, and the extra work-load caused it to really revolt against you, a HDD will not do that, except if it can somehow generate a load of amps, which it doesn't do.
AS for processor choice, currently Intel is kind, the Phenoms are a bit disappointing, only thing keeping them in market is they undercut Intel's equivalent performance cpu's in price, here in SA in any case.
At this point I think AMD's fastest Phenom struggles to put down half on benchmark that Intel can, but then again, that AMD chip is a fifth of the Intel's price. Apples - pears I suppose.
The new opterons seems fast, have seen independent tests, wow there is an AMD in the top five. Not yet available in SA.
I've replaced a load of PSU's in the area where I stay, I've found, funny enough, A-open units last the longest. Our power sucks, and jumps up and down the whole time. The PSU's supplied with cases here, you'll be lucky to get 10 months service from them.

 

[eblc1388]

Next Time you Think of Upgrading your HD think about the PS

Yes, a smaller power supply.

Just bought a Hitachi 320G harddisk.

The specification said it uses 40% less power than the previous generation of harddisks.