First post, by DeadnightWarrior
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all,
I'm having a lot of trouble getting my current retro rig to even install an OS.
I recently got an AsRock 775i65G 2.0 for a very good price.
Around the same time, I acquired an Intel Core2Quad Q6600 and a GeForce 6600GT AGP, both for pennies (the CPU was 6.5€ shipped and the GPU was 15€ shipped!).
Basically my retro project is nothing more than a hobby to kill time, so I try to spend as less money as I can on it. That's why I have a very, very basic case that came with an included "chinese crap" PSU (this one).
Keep in mind that this PSU could easily handle an Athlon 64 2800+, a Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M motherboard, a Radeon 9600 Pro or a GeForce FX5600, a PCI sound card, a DVD drive and an SSD.
Since I rebuilt the system around the 775i65G I started having trouble.
Truth be told, I began trying an old Pentium D 950 paired with the GeForce FX5600 I had lying around and it seemed to work fine, got Windows 98SE installed and everything looked OK.
Except under Win98SE the video card seems unable to display any kind of widescreen resolution, but that's another story...
Then I put the Q6600 which was correctly detected, even if I still have to upgrade to the latest BIOS version (what I have now is version 3.00) and swapped the FX5600 with the 6600GT: I never got to complete an OS installation.
The system would freeze at boot, sometimes not even displaying anything and I'd be forced to clear CMOS and start over. This happened a dozen times more or less.
I never even managed to get the BIOS updated.
As the 6600GT does need external power via a molex connector, I started thinking maybe my power supply was not keeping up with it. Though googling a bit I found someone saying that the card needs 18A on the 12+V rail and my PSU should theoretically be able to output 26A...
So I kept the CPU and put the FX5600, that does NOT require external power, back but I'm having the same issues. A bit less than before but still the same issues.
Please note: even though I have a cheap CPU cooler, I had absolutely no indication of overheating. Also, I'd really like to keep the quad core as this system is meant to triple boot Win98SE, WinXP and some kind of Linux distro. That's why I'd want to have more than a single core CPU: with XP, the Athlon 64 2800+ I had before would be constantly pegged to 100% usage, seriously slowing even the most basic tasks.
All that being said, which of the following parts could be the primary cause for my problems: CPU, PSU, GPU or mainboard?
Thanks for any suggestions you might have!