I finally overloaded my power supply...

I was finally able to overload my 300-watt Sparkle power supply today.
The machine would lock up hard on me. I recently upgraded one of the
CDRW's to a DVD-burner, and added a second hard drive. When the power
supply finally couldn't handle it, I was doing all of the following
simultaneously:

- running two SETI@Home instances
- burning a DVD
- watching a streaming video
- decrypting some DVD files from one hard drive to another.

The cheap power supply was feeding:

- Two AthlonMP 1800+ chips
- 2 gigs of ECC memory
- a GeForce2 MX AGP video card
- A Permedia2 PCI video card
- A DVD-ROM
- A DVD-RW
- Two IDE drives
- Two sound cards
- Network card
- Extra USB card

I went in the back room, grabbed an Enermax 550-watt power supply, and
everything seems to be working fine.

steve

I had the same thing happen on my Athlon T-Bird 1.1 machine. Added a
Raid Controller and a 120GB Drive, already had 2 other drives and DVD
and CD Burner. all PCI slots occupied it refused to boot until I
removed one drive. The PSU was only 350W. Naturally as the machine
was an early Gateway the new 550W PSU would not fit in the box as it
has Gatewas own fixtures to make sure amateurs "Don't even try try to
fix anything" I had to fix it with cable ties. everything was fine
until a new graphic card caused a short cir-quit and burned the mobo
down to its socks. luckily only the mobo and G-card were burned so a
new mobo (elitegroup u400 nForce2) and some memory, new case and some
fans (all cheap on ebay) it's running again. Now I want to overclock
that Athlon t-bird until it smokes.
I want to buy a new XP chip but I have to justify it (wife thinks
it's all a waste of money) Doom 3 is not enough of an excuse for my
wife. Damn women all they want in life is Sims2 for MacOs X.

Whats this Sims and chicks thing ?, can't work that out


On 16 Sep 2004 06:01:39 -0400,
lid (grevillep)
wrote:

I had the same thing happen on my Athlon T-Bird 1.1 machine. Added a
Raid Controller and a 120GB Drive, already had 2 other drives and DVD
and CD Burner. all PCI slots occupied it refused to boot until I
removed one drive. The PSU was only 350W. Naturally as the machine
was an early Gateway the new 550W PSU would not fit in the box as it
has Gatewas own fixtures to make sure amateurs "Don't even try try to
fix anything" I had to fix it with cable ties. everything was fine
until a new graphic card caused a short cir-quit and burned the mobo
down to its socks. luckily only the mobo and G-card were burned so a
new mobo (elitegroup u400 nForce2) and some memory, new case and some
fans (all cheap on ebay) it's running again. Now I want to overclock
that Athlon t-bird until it smokes.
I want to buy a new XP chip but I have to justify it (wife thinks
it's all a waste of money) Doom 3 is not enough of an excuse for my
wife. Damn women all they want in life is Sims2 for MacOs X.