First post, by dpirate
Hello,
I am trying to build an Athlon XP system that is as silent as possible. I recently bought a new EPoX EP-8RDA3I motherboard because the ASRock K7VT4A Pro that I bought in the early 2000s does not have a 12 volt connector and therefore requires a PSU with a 30+ amp 5 volt rail to work with something like an Athlon XP 2800+ . I have an Enermax power supply that delivers 30+ amps on the 5 volt rail but it is even noisier than the CPU fan. I hate having to hear that thing. So the hope was that I could just use my trusty silent 350w Seasonic SII power supply with the EPoX and be done with it. Things are not working great unfortunately. I suspect that this motherboard doesn't really use the P4 connector for the CPU but I can't be 100% sure. When I run burnK6 on FreeBSD to push the CPU to it's limits the machine just blacks out and reboots while the CPU temp is still at around 50 degrees. I have a 3ware 8006-2LP SATA hardware RAID controller in this machine and sometimes at boot the machine will freeze when loading this controller's add-on BIOS. And I also have random missing characters in Xorg. Before I go and buy another PSU such as a Corsair one with a 30 amp 5 volt rail that may or may not be silent enough, can anyone confirm that this motherboard does or does not use the P4 connector for the CPU?
PS: I'm using a Radeon 9600 PRO in this system if that changes anything.