RacoonRider wrote:Tetrium wrote: I'm not sure if all sA boards that actually have this connector, really use the 12v instead of the 5v
You're correct, for my Socket A machine a 18A 5V rail was not enough despite the 4-pin 12V connector (Ga-7n400s mobo).
The symptoms I experienced with PSU not being enough for the systems were random hangs and reboots, even at idle state. Changing the videocard might give you a clue, when I swapped the hungry 9800Pro to an effecient 9600Pro, it cured the issue.
Thanks for confirming 😀 ...though the news you bring is kinda a letdown.
The thing is that I know little more about sA P4 motherboard connectors except that I knew they existed. In such a case I really won't assume that particular sA board can provide the CPU with power from the 12v line, though I had hoped these boards would.
I think there was a thread roughly a month ago about the power draw of old graphics cards, specifically how much the drew from the 5v and how much from the 12v ones (with these days obviously the 12v ones being the preferred ones, if one can choose).
I'd still like to find more info on this, but I'll get to that later 😀
Back when I did one of my earlier upgrades to my (then still fairly new) Barton 3200+, one of the things was to replace the 300W FSP with a Tagan 380W PSU, mostly because it had better 12v rails while still having plenty on the 5v rail.
The FSP PSU was something like 30A 5v and 15A 12v, the Tagan I can't remember, but the graphics card was upgraded from a R9600 (the 256MB Sapphire one) to a 7600GS and later finally to the HD 4670 and power was stable with the Tagan.
However, when putting in the new PSU I did notice this Fujitsu Siemens VIA KT600 board (made by Gigabyte actually) had the same P4 connector on the motherboard, but I ended up plugging it in anyway but I really can't tell which rail it used as both 5v and 12v rail were powerful enough.
I think the 5v:12v power draw of old graphics cards is still somewhat unexplored territory and I'd like to learn more about this 😀
Godlike wrote:nforce4max wrote:
As you know PSU is the most important part in PC. Of course is more difficult to get NEW older high quality unit than getting newer PSU. People don't want to damage thier high quality builds and rare stuff in it with older but used PSU so that's why this tread has opened, to find compromise solutions or eventually modify new psu's to work with golden era standards. I think PSU threads is right on the place. Distributing right electricity to components could be really important for stability. PC's withot power are nothing really...like a car without gasoline. Apart from that what brand you recommend ?
You can still find new old stock power supplies on eBay for peanuts sometimes if you take the time to look, landed a boxed Enermax just last week for $20 shipped.
You are jumping the gun by at least 5 years maybe more when there is still the option of just going with older units and modding modern power supplies is going a bit far.
Good to talk about advantages and disadvantages of this subject. Some people don't know where to look for new old stock. What brand/model do you suggest for CUSL2-C as best choice? I need powerful unit 350-400W
Why would you want a 350W/400W PSU for a Pentium 3 btw?
Athlon XP can do with 30A on the 5v rail, provided the graphics card doesn't draw a lot of power from the 5v as well.
In my opinion 30A should be plenty for s370, even 25A was no problem to me in any of my previous builds.
Personally I think 20A on a high-end s370 rig would be pushing it, I'd probably use such PSUs for either s7/ss7 or with an even older rig using one of those AT adapters
And I agree with what has been mentioned (either directly or more indirectly) in previous replies about always check the insides of your older PSU before you're going to be using it to attempt to power up retro hardware