You want to do something nice and... (rant)

[mariushm]

cheap shitty power supplies are against you...

I'm here at my parent's house ... I wanted to do something nice for my father who uses this computer just to buy stamps and coins and watch youtube clips of the bands he liked when he was younger.

The old system has a Sempron 1500+ and 1 GB of memory... I upgraded it to a barton 3000+ (2.2ghz) and 1.5 Gb of memory.
Now I'm looking at the voltages and I see the 12v sitting at 12.6v on idle and going up to 13v when cpu usage is at 100%

I'm starting occt to make sure the board is stable (asus a7v600-x, had to update bios to recognize the cpu properly) and I see the 12v going from 12.6 to 12.8-12.9v.
Placed the probes of a cheap multimeter on the hard drive molex input and I see 13.02v

Now I wonder if I should replace the simple tnt2 m64 card with a geforce 4 mx 400 because that would only add more load on 3.3v or 5v and screw things up even more.
I dont even know if the geforce 4 would help with the youtube vides ... does it have some hardware acceleration i wonder? I guess i'll see later..

The mb is all 5v, there's onle the cpu fan and the hard drive using 12v.. i guess it needs more load on 12v to get less voltage.

(excuse the typing mistakes, writing through a laggy remote desktop connection session)

[SuperDuty]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

My father has a similar computer to buy...stamps as well

His is based on an XP 2400+, an ECS 741-M, 1.5Gb of DDR, an FX5200 and a 160Gb HDD, power by a 200W Seasonic PSU. Works like a champ for a nearly ten years old computer.

13.02V on the +12V is way too high indeed. What power supply are you using ? You don't need much power for a computer like that, a good quality 200W PSU of 2002-2004 should be easy to get and very cheap. The Seasonic in my father's computer was given to me.

I don't think you would get much improvement going from a TNT2 M64 (DirectX 6) to a GeForce2 MX400 (nor with a GeForce 4 MX420/440/460 if that's what you have, as they're DirectX 7 cards, they're like slightly improved GeForce 2). They're all low end cards with little to no acceleration for a modern use, especially Youtube.
I had installed a GeForce2 MX400 on my father's computer and it couldn't play 480p videos. No problem with the FX5200. But I would recommend going with a better GPU with, an AGP GeForce 7 or Radeon X1xxx would be perfect.

[tmiha71]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

I don't think you would get much improvement going from a TNT2 M64 (DirectX 6) to a GeForce2 MX400 (nor with a GeForce 4 MX420/440/460 if that's what you have, as they're DirectX 7 cards, they're like slightly improved GeForce 2).

Wrong, TNT2 uses SDRAM and it's 64 bit's wide, at 142MHz-max (and I think there's no cache on GPU ?), GeForce4MX uses DDR SDRAM - with 166MHz or even 200 MHz and 128 bit wide, that alone should bring noticeable increase in performance (especially GDI performance should rise, other things - probably no astonishing increase in performance)...

As 12V to high, probably too weak +5V rail... Get a better PSU, or put one notch better capacitor on +5V rail (may or may not help)...

[mariushm]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

The 12v is still around 12.8-13v when cpu is loaded.. it's high but can't do much about it from here. I only visit my parents' place 3-4 times a year so i don't have anything besides screwdrivers and a multimeter here.
The previous power supply in this system was one of those Premier 400w cheap but OK power supplies. Ok for the 100-150w the system was using. Alas, the power supply died along with a video card in a storm, so my father went to a local store and bought a cheap 450w psu they had at the store.
I don't know who makes it and i don't have a digital camera with me to snap some shots, but according to label it's just 12v @ 16a , 5v @ 35a , 3.3v@24a (250w max supposedly on 5v+3.3v) so it's probably barely a 250w at best.

The GeForce 4 mx 400 did help a bit but youtube still lags a bit with 480p in window mode.. full screen, forget about it.
Media Player classic home cinema plays 1920x1080 mpeg2 40mbps at about 14fps but sound doesn't stutter. with SD resolutions it has no problems playing smoothly... the typical h264 rips (720ish x 400ish) work smoothly.
It worked for a few weeks now, hopefully it won't crap out after I leave. Next time I come here I'll probably bring a couple of fans just to add some load on the 12v rail.

[SuperDuty]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

Wrong, TNT2 uses SDRAM and it's 64 bit's wide, at 142MHz-max (and I think there's no cache on GPU ?), GeForce4MX uses DDR SDRAM - with 166MHz or even 200 MHz and 128 bit wide, that alone should bring noticeable increase in performance (especially GDI performance should rise, other things - probably no astonishing increase in performance)...

As 12V to high, probably too weak +5V rail... Get a better PSU, or put one notch better capacitor on +5V rail (may or may not help)...

Increased memory size and speed affects mostly performance in real time 3D and textures display, as well as resolution. Since his use is mostly basic internet and a bit of Youtube video, I doubt the bus width and memory speed would have any use at these tasks. It's more the video decoding capabilities that matter here, and both cards aren't really good at that, at least in a modern internet environement.

A GeForce 4 MX is a bit better than a GeForce 2 MX400, but the MX420 uses 64bit SDR and was a very poor excuse at making a GeForce 4. The MX440 uses DDR but can have a 64bit or 128bit bus, the MX460 has higher clocks and much faster RAM, but it is harder to find that the other two.

I wouldn't use any card from this era to watch videos todays, they just can't above a certain resolution. Even the high end GeForce 6 and Radeon Xxxx have trouble decoding FullHD videos.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

cheap shitty power supplies are against you...

I'm here at my parent's house ... I wanted to do something nice for my father who uses this computer just to buy stamps and coins and watch youtube clips of the bands he liked when he was younger.

The old system has a Sempron 1500+ and 1 GB of memory... I upgraded it to a barton 3000+ (2.2ghz) and 1.5 Gb of memory.
Now I'm looking at the voltages and I see the 12v sitting at 12.6v on idle and going up to 13v when cpu usage is at 100%

I'm starting occt to make sure the board is stable (asus a7v600-x, had to update bios to recognize the cpu properly) and I see the 12v going from 12.6 to 12.8-12.9v.
Placed the probes of a cheap multimeter on the hard drive molex input and I see 13.02v

Now I wonder if I should replace the simple tnt2 m64 card with a geforce 4 mx 400 because that would only add more load on 3.3v or 5v and screw things up even more.
I dont even know if the geforce 4 would help with the youtube vides ... does it have some hardware acceleration i wonder? I guess i'll see later..

The mb is all 5v, there's onle the cpu fan and the hard drive using 12v.. i guess it needs more load on 12v to get less voltage.

(excuse the typing mistakes, writing through a laggy remote desktop connection session)

FYI, Asus socket 462 boards are always off of +5V!

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

FYI, Asus socket 462 boards are always off of +5V!

Yes, and that's the issue at hand. Newer cheap power supplies, even if they're based on the same old designs, are tweaked to get a bit more output on 12v. But the feedback is still 5v dominant, so with high load on 5v and almost no load on 12v, 12v will be high.

13v on 12v isn't a problem though. The only devices that may not like it are hard drives - but if the HDD didn't go up in smoke first time you powered the PC on, it will be fine.

[mariushm]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

I had to make do with what I had here at my parents' place so I simply went out to a car parts store and bought a 12v 21w lightbulb. No electronics stores around and a light bulb is cheap (about 50 cents).
Now the computer has a light inside it and the voltage stays around 12.5-12.65v on idle. When abusing it with occt, it rarely crosses over 13v.

One more thing I noticed is that even with the latest bios, on this motherboard asus a7v600-x the barton i has is not recognized properly. It's supposed to be 2200 Mhz (166 Mhz x some multiplier) but by default it sets it at 1050 mhz.
If I manually set it to proper multiplier, after a restart it defaults to 10.5x multiplier or 1750 Mhz.
I had to set it to 200 Mhz x 10.5 to get 2100 Mhz out of this cpu.

Let's hope this Barton can handle 200 Mhz fsb, it's supposed to be 166 Mhz by default.

[mariushm]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

Well, surprising turn of events.

About two hours ago, the power supply died on me all of the sudden. Of course, being Saturday and 7pm no shops open so I went to a local craigslist type of site (mercador.ro) and found a guy selling an old system for 30$ and I offered him $15 for just the power supply.

I lost my cheapo nokia 1200 in the cab on the way there but that's another story .. hopefully i'll get it back in hour or so.

This power supply is still one of those cheap ones (Delux / premier/ L&C etc) that came with computer cases but it will have to do - i have to leave tomorrow morning and i didn't want to leave my parents without a working computer.

This one idles at around 12.4v and goes to about 12.6v on idle without the extra lightbulb and seems to eject cold air from the back so hopefully it will last.

I'll take this crap psu with me back to my place and make some pictures as i don't have a camera here...13007 transistors and a transformer so small it's probably an ER-25 or something like that. Don't see what died in it though just by a visual inspection.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

1050 mhz.

You need to manually set the FSB to 166 Mhz, even with late socket 462 boards.

And if it was an Abit, it probably would be off +12V. (NF7 and AN7 get Vcore from +12V.)

[ratdude747]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

You need to manually set the FSB to 166 Mhz, even with late socket 462 boards.

And if it was an Abit, it probably would be off +12V. (NF7 and AN7 get Vcore from +12V.)

I know my Gigabyte dualie 462 also ran of 12V... A lot of later boards added the 12V P4 plug and then ran the CPU off that rail... all that takes is a few VRM tweaks. Given that the market at the time was going towards 12V heavy designs , IMHO it was a good idea... foiled by crap brands (even including the thermaltake 430W of doom) who marked 5V designs as 12V units.

Too bad mariushm isn't local or else I'd have a stack of 250Wish OEM pulls to pick from... One or two are even 5V heavy (like a 300W AGI I have).

[tmiha71]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

so I simply went out to a car parts store and bought a 12v 21w lightbulb.

Inductive load (most likely), probably temp dependent -> killed PSU...

[mariushm]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

It's possible... it's also possible it was just a lousy power supply from the start... see the insides here :

https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showpo...&postcount=864

[Behemot]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

GF2 also has slightly wider acceleration support, some MPEG involved but that's probably not enough for todays standards. The problem with tube is it is very processor intensive. Very often you can play the video file in VLC just fine but no way in browser through flash.

That PSU is worst of worst. How much it weights BTW? That must be hardly over pack of cigs.

[SeanB]

Re: You want to do something nice and... (rant)

I think I will have to change my PSU soon, heard a pop today and smelt well toasted electrolytic, so will have to do a look and see what is dead. God thing I have a new in box Huntkey CP350 complete with Jianghou capacitors as a replacement. 51 days of uptime about to be turned off.