So, my PC shut down and would not power up. I assumed it was the power supply and ran out to Best Buy and picked up a RocketFish RF-500WPS2
500w "gaming" power supply as a replacement (I had a Ultra ATI 500w). I have a question on the connections below:



The black HDD/SATA connectors do not have a 8-pin power for my GeForce 9600 GSO graphics card and the PCIe connector cables do. Looking at the instructions it does show standard 12v from the PCIe plugs. I assume the PCIe connector is what should be hooked to the graphics card for power?

Assuming that to be the case I connected one up and the card sparked and shut down the PC. Nice stinky burned electric smell. I pulled it and swapped back in my old graphics card that does not need additional power and I'm up with one monitor working at least. My assumption at this point is that the original power supply was probably OK and the 9600 card was what went bad (I was having lockup issues with one screen the last day or two and the PC randomly shut down a few times the last month). I'm just looking for confirmation that the PCIe connection is the correct one for video cards as I'll be ordering a new one.

Yeah, 8pin PCIe to your vid card. What's odd is I think my vid card is newer (radeon 4870 1GB) but uses the older 6pin (two of 'em) connector. Oh well.

http://www.playtool.com/pages/psuconnec ... ciexpress8

Cool, thanks for the validation. PC is fine without the graphics card other than I don't have dual monitors working right now which is weird.

Time to look around and find another graphics card. I'm running a old GeForce 7300 right now.

Ouch.

Radeon 4870 1GB for $115
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121376

Or go a bit cheaper. Radeon 5450 for $10 shipped. Just join their free membership thing in order to get free shipping.
http://www.mwave.com/mwave/SKUSearch_v3 ... ia=BD11227

Would have to be dual DVI. Is the fan on the 4870 loud? The fan on the 9600 never stopped and was noisy as crap.

The fan on my 4870 is different than the one pictured, but CCC lets you adjust the fan speed.

Mine sucks in internal air and blows it out the back of the case. When it's not doing anything, or working hard, I can't hear the fan on it because it's typically running between 3-10% according to my Catalyst control center. However, I can manually change the fan speed and at 100%, I would be surprised if the neighbors couldn't hear it. I think the highest my fan has automatically gone up to was in the 30's or maybe the 40's%

I can tell you my 4870 scored a 7.6 on the two Win7 Performance tests and plays high bitrate movies like Avatar without a sweat.

Thermalright also makes GPU coolers if you want even quieter operation. I looked into them, but since I'll be selling nearly all of my computer stuff (including my vid card) once I can get the data pulled off my drives, I wasn't going to spend money trying to silence/cool something I was going to be getting rid of.

audtatious wrote:Would have to be dual DVI.

Most newer cards from ATI eschew multiple VGA or DVI ports in favor of DisplayPort to facilitate their Eyefiniti multimonitor tech.
But with the 5450 above, you could just run an HDMI to DVI adapter and you'd be set with dual DVI. HDMI and DVI are cross-compatible as far as signal goes.

Maybe I'm too late but I just got a SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 5670 1GB DDR5 and I am super pleased with it. The fan at 100% is barley noticeable. It creates more heat than my old GT 9400 but I have been running it with a 300 watt PSU with no issues. I ordered an other PSU but in the mean time this guy is awesome. It has the "ATI Eyefinity" so it can run 3 monitors. Also it comes with a HDMI-DVI adapter so you can run your dual DVI setup. Also it is realitivly cheap at ~$100. The 512MB card also does "ATI Eyefinity" for slightly cheaper. Both run on mobo power.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102869
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814102870

You have a DMM? I would check the voltage on that lead before I hook another expensive graphics card to it, its not at all uncommon for power supplies to throw voltages that are way out of tolerance. Capacitors get cold in shipping and do not function properly once they get too cold.