- Dual monitors causing a system to lock?
- Posted by Mr Piquet on October 30th, 2005
Strange one this... 2 problems that might be linked.
When running either 2 LCD or 1 CRT & 1 LCD in Dual head mode my system
keeps freezing up or running VERY slowly intermittently. However when a
single screen is connected everything is (well was) fine. Just this
week the system has started freezing & then restarted giving me a
Windows error code as usual. The lock & restart again seem to be
intermittent.
I am running the following
AMD64 4000+ 939
MSI Neo Platinum Pro MB (nForce 4 chipset)
2Gb DDR400 RAM
Leadtek PCIe 6600GT
4x 250Gb SATA HDD
1x 250Gb PATA HDD
1x LiteOn DVD DL
1x LiteOn DVD ROM
Thermaltake 380W PSU
Chenbro Gaming Bomb Case
I am thinking 2 possible causes...
1 - Heat (Although I feel I have ample cooling)
2 - PSU (Is a 380W TT ample for this rig?)
One of my main uses for this baby is serious work with Photoshop &
thats seems to be where the freezing occurs the most!
I am losing major time & dollars with these issues... Any ideas would
be GREATLY appreciated!
Cheers
Mike.
- Posted by Dave Lear on October 30th, 2005
"Mr Piquet" wrote in message
news:1130656880.873293.148150@o13g2000cwo.googlegr oups.com
Having seen the list of devices you're running inside that baby my first
thought would be the PSU isn't capable of supplying enough power when all
the devices are drawing current. Providing the drives aren't in a RAID
configuration you could try removing a couple of them (and the DVD ROM as
you have two) and see if that relieves the problem. If it does it's time to
go get yourself a 600W PSU.
- Posted by why? on October 30th, 2005
On 30 Oct 2005 00:21:20 -0700, Mr Piquet wrote:
with only 1 display.
Optical devices could be 12V x 1A + 5V x 2A , 25W , always round up a
bit too have a safe margin.
If it's the PSU supplied with the case and not a special order see about
upgrading it. You may need to work out from your component list the
voltage / current max required and power. If one of the voltage sources
can't quite supply near max current you can have problems.
Power (Watts) = Voltage x Current.
Not knowing what model of drives, the 7 drives could be about 125W, the
graphics card of which there are several GT models, could be 75W.
That about 200W used already, add CPU around 90W , now it's 290W.
You should be aiming for power of the components to be about 90% of the
PSU rating. Without the motherboard / memory / usb counted you look like
it's close to the 340 of the 380 total. You would have to work out the
rest of the numbers yourself.
<snip>
Me
- Posted by Mr Piquet on October 30th, 2005
Actually I have just double checked & the PSU is a TT 430W... I am
assuming that would not make a great difference right?
- Posted by why? on October 31st, 2005
On 30 Oct 2005 15:17:08 -0800, Mr Piquet wrote:
Please include some of the post you are replying to.
The extra watts are handy, you should maybe start looking at how much
current each voltage rail supplies. For the number of devices you have
it might be , for example you have lots of spare amps on +5V but maybe
not enough for +12V.
It's not only the total W of the PSU, it's what the max for each voltage
rail can supply in amps, or even if it's a stable supply of amps and
doesn't suffer from droupouts.
Me
