First post, by srmeister
Hi,
im building a P3 slot 1 system right now. The Mobo is Gigabyte GA-6BA which is a Baby-AT board. It has 1x AGP, 5xPCI and 2x ISA. The board is pretty good but i tried to upgrade the graphics card to a Radeon 9800 SE which according to http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/graphics/dis … owercons_8.html draws arround 30W when idle. Its not really alot. Even full load is only 55W. Remember i got a 9800 SE when this site lists power consumption for 9800 Pro, so i should be even lower.
My problem is the PC just crashed after a while with this cards ( i got 2 of these 9800 SE and problem is the same with both).
It has a floppy drive power connector so it draws current directly from the power supply, besides from the AGP slot.
I just saw in BIOS, this board has a Voltage Display in BIOS, and i can watch the +3.3V drop and drop until about the last reading is 3.0V then the machine just goes black. Same symptom when iam idle in Windows (W98 SE). The machine just goes black after ~2minutes.
I tried different PSU's: 2x 350W, 1x220W. Same problem on each PSU. So i guess the PSU Rating doesnt matter.
Also, the PC is mostly empty: connected is only one HDD and nothing else.
What can i do to make this setup stable, if anything? I assume the board doesnt supply enough current to the AGP slot. In the Link above, the guy soldered wires to the graphics card's AGP connector in order to measure the current going through.
Hope you have some ideas about this mess,
Stefan