I remember that Vogons user prophase_j recommended PSUs with at least 30 amps on the 5 volt rail for high powered Athlon mobos. How many amps does your PSU's 5 volt rail provide?

Hmm... A mere 20amps... Are you sure though? Most PSUs today supply about 16 to 20 amps, so it'd be pretty hard to find one with 30amps (not cheap anyway!)

The PSU is your problem. Try looking on ebay for Enermax and ThermalTake PSUs from around the year 2003. When I was looking for them about a year ago, I had no problems in finding them. Eg ThermalTake PurePower 480W, or Enermax - I think the good ones have the code number 465 in them. Either of those PSUs have about 40 amps on the 5 volt rail. Great for high powered Athlon systems, such as yours. Good luck.

That's going to cost me way more than I'd like to pay. I might as well go for a Pentium 4 board. Do these also require as much Amps on the 5V rail?

Pentium 4 boards were designed differently to the Athlon boards. They require a 12V PSU connector to feed power to the CPU. Luckily, you don't need lots of amps on the 5V rail with P4s.

Yes, that's what I had in mind. I'll give it a look as well!

Here's a few gfx questions before I go work on the car.

I've read about others that do both cards in a machine. Can probably use bios to tell with gfx card to use. What do you do about monitor output or driver conflicts? Also Alienware had sold some pc's that had a proprietary system to use a tnt2 and v3 in the same rig... how did they make that happen?

Oh that's easy and very convenient. I only know how to do it with an AGP and a PCI card only though, not sure if it can be done with 2 pci cards. Basically, you have to go to the BIOS setting "Init first: AGP/PCI" You select whichever you want, plug the monitor cable accordingly and there you go. You install the drivers individually for each card and Windows recognise only one card at a time, so no driver conflicts!

Thanks, I was thinking it would go that way. So it won't have irq conflicts?

I was thinking like a kvm switch for the monitors or some monitor switch so you don't have to play with the vga cable.

Now I'm thinking of installing a Geforce 4 Ti 4600 AGP and a voodoo 3 2000 PCI for fun. Maybe even a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI 😉

Not sure about IRQ Conflicts... 🙁
It's really handy, you get a GeForce 4 Ti in there for 2001-2004 games and keep a Voodoo 3 or 5 for 2000 and earlier and VESA. It rocks 😁!

Cool. I ordered a 4 port VGA switch off ebay for $9. Will give it a shoot when it arrives.

As for your PSU. I had bought a Rosewill 350W ATx 1.3 from newegg that supports 35A@5v
Its OOS currently but if you live in the states check it out. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?It … N82E16817182006

Yea the late Athlon boards sucked down the 5v line like nobody's business. A LOT of boards even required the aux power connector! I'm not talking about the 4 pin 12v line, but a 6 pin At style connector.

I'm really apprehensive to let the secret out, but "back in the day" they made a power supply from some random Taiwan company., Superflower. They are still around and make a very good power supply. That being said they are hard to get in the states. But their first supplies were cheap and actually very reliable. They had MASSIVE 5V and 5VSB rails. Here is a review to their largest supply: http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/ca … _QuadFan_1.html

You read right. 52A on the 5V line. They usually come in weird colors. I just bought a green 450W one not too long ago. I watch ebay for these guys, because they are rather un-common. But worth it if you find one that wasn't abused.

I live in Europe, Greece in particular, so importing PSUs is going to cost quite a bit, since they're not light. I was reading another topic I created last year about another Athlon board that I owned and I said that I had a PSU with 40A on the 5V rail. I think I know where that PSU is, I'll look for it and see if it works! In the end, I might as well scrap it all and just go for a Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz or something.

actually the power supplies I recommended are easier to find in Europe.

I use older FPS PSU's for my Athlon rigs. The 300W ones usually have around 30A on the 5V line but only 13A/15A or 18A on the 12V line.
They aren't suitable for high end graphics cards though. These PSU's are (or were) relatively easy to find second hand for peanuts here in The Netherlands.

After an excessive amount of tests, I've come to the conclusion that the PSU is not the problem here. I've tried a plethora of PSUs, one with 30A on the 5V rail, another with 34, another with 40 and a couple of other ones at 26A. All of them hang during Windows installation with all the cards installed.
I thought that it may be some kind of IRQ conflict, so I removed all cards other than the GeForce 4 Ti4200, and although I managed to install WinME successfully, it hanged once during the installation and then corrupted my setup after a couple of restarts. Windows Protection Error screens started appearing too... I should note that the board had about 6 bulged capacitors which I replaced successfully (seemingly at least, it worked great with the Voodoo 5).
So the system works fine with the Voodoo 5 but will not work with any Nvidia card that I own... What the hell, have I run into some kind of incompatibility?
I'll install the Athlon XP 1600+ back in and see where it gets me, but I can't say I have high hopes.
What a load of shit, these Athlons have always been a load of trouble...

My AMD 750 mobo will freeze up with WinME if I install most virtual CD apps. Daemon Tools prevents it from booting in fact. 98SE works fine.

Have you tried 98? Or 2K, XP? Could be some sort of old crappy ACPI problem.

BTW, here's a thrilling article about ATX power supplies and how the rails have changed over the years.
http://www.playtool.com/pages/psurailhistory/rails.html

I didn't even have a chance to install anything like that! Daemon Tools used to do that for me as well, last time I checked.
I just don't get it. How the the hell can it work fine with a Voodoo 5 and not any GeForce card? Can this be an ACPI problem?

Could be ACPI related. Try 98SE or XP.