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Bad video card, or not enough power?


Tommy

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So I'm not as much into hardware as I'm into software/operating systems, so maybe someone can shine some light in on this.

It may seem obvious but I want to know for sure. I have a 500 watt EVGA power supply and a EVGA GeForce GTX275 that says the minimum power is 550 watts. It has two ports for six pin power connectors. Obviously, my power supply falls a bit short. But this is where it gets weird.

When I first turn the computer on, it will reboot itself about 4 times before giving a beep code of 1 long and 3 short beeps and then it continues to POST, even though you can't see anything on the monitor. If I hit the reset button, the fan will go full speed for a second, slow back down, and then the display will come up.

While in Windows, it shows it is running at a PCI-E x1 speed, the slowest possible speed.

How important is that 50 watts and is there some fail safe that detects the wattage of a power supply and refuses to boot on initial power up and then it somehow falls back to x1? Or could this be a bad card? It's not the computer because it has happened on two different ones, very same behavior. I wasn't aware of this requirement when I bought the card and I don't have any stronger PSUs to test it with.

I'm just wondering since I've run other video cards at under the minimum requirement back in my early computing days, or at least at the very minimum. I would think it would at least POST and throttle down if loads got to be too much on it, but then maybe this card is able to determine how much wattage it can pull from the PSU and it realizes that it falls a bit short of that.

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Are you really sure-sure that the PSU provides 500W?

I would personally use (rule of thumb)  a 650 or 750 W PSU  if the requirement is 550 W for the graphic card (even if they are often higher than real, they are not so much off AFAICR).

The issue might be not so much on the total power, but rather on how much power on which rail/connector.

500 W @12V are like 40 amperes (and it seems like those are actually "required" that is a lot of "juice"):

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/evga-geforce-gtx-275-1792mb-review,6.html

A 500W PSU is more likely to have only 30-32 A on the 12 V rail, still only for booting there shouldn't be issues. :dubbio:

jaclaz

 

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Here's my power supply right here: https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=100-W1-0500-KR

That might help give more information on whether or not it is sufficient or lacking in power. See, I don't necessarily *mind* buying a stronger one, but I don't want to buy a stronger one if it's not going to solve the problem.

I actually lied when I said I don't have a more powerful supply, I have one of those Chiefmax ones in a Windows 98 machine I built years ago that I haven't powered on in years and I think it was rated at 650 watts but I was told you really don't trust them on that one since Chiefmax isn't really known for the best power supplies in the world.

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No, that one is fine, it has "full" 40 A on the12 V rail. :)

Yours  is a "non-standard" PSU with a more beefy 12 V power output expressly designed for high end graphic cards, it is "just right".

It must be "something else" (i.e. either the power supply is defective or the card, or the motherboard, etc.),

You will need anyway to troubleshoot replacing (temporarily) the components :(.

jaclaz

 

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I'm sure it's not the MB, since it happened on two different ones. But for reference, both are Gigabyte boards. My current one is a GIGABYTE GA-Z68P-DS3 Rev 1.0, and the previous one which this also happened on was a Gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G Rev 1.4.

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