Is it safe?

[mustrum]

Ok i got my radon 9700 this week and it worked nice after i installed it. I bought a 350 PSU for this card so i have no power issues. IIt has very good specs on all rails and costed me a small fortune.
Now i got cold boot problems al the time!!! After turning the PC on i got 4 beeps and needed to warmstart to get the system to boot (each time i start up).
I tried everything i could find about this problem (at rage3d) but no use.

As last try i put in my 250W PSU (from same manufacturer as the 350W one.... just a weaker model) and guess what?... no problems anymore!!!

It's working all fine but i am a bit worried that the PSU will blow someday and kill my whole system.

Btw: I run sisoft sandra and all rails are ok but the 12V on that runs only on 11.31 (also did on the 350W PSU though)

The system runs rocksolid. No reboots or crashes during 3dmark or gaming.

[jandar]

It should be ok.

Thing to remember, the more HDD and CD drives you have, the more power used.

http://www.upgradesource.com/advice/advice061001.html

great stuff for finding power consumption.

For instance, my setup:
P4 2.4B @ 2.8 = 65W
Motherboard with Raid/Lan = 55W
2 512MB DDR Sticks = 70W
CDRW = 25W
DVD-R = 35W
6 HDD = 120W (4 40GB, 1 60GB, 1 80GB)
SoundCard = 10W
4 80MM Casefans = 20W
1 120MM fan = 8W
1 60MM fan = 5W
1 CPU fan = 5W
Radeon 9700Pro = 50W

~470Watts

good thing I have a 550Watt power Supply

[WaltC]

Never judge a power supply by its declared maximum wattage rating. What counts a lot more is the amperage per rail, and the quality of the PSU. These days I only go with PSUs which separate the voltage rails from each other so that the combined 5v & 3.3v rail wattage totals are no longer a concern. From what I've read recently that leaves me a short list of PC Power & Cooling and Antec...;) I've used both with the 9700P and other, power-hungry hardware with no ill results (Antec TruePower 430 & PC Power & Cooling 450.)

Avoid generic PSUs like the plague as they rarely live up to their declared power levels.

[kyleb]

i would lay money down that the cold boot thing is just an issue with your motherboad; i had the same trouble with my kr7a raid. even if i ran the board with just cpu, mem and vid i still had the issue. this is on a 431w enermax so i find it hard to say that the powersuply was an issue. also note that some asus boards had issues as well but asus was cool enough to fix it in their bios.

[Ichneumon]

i would lay money down that the cold boot thing is just an issue with your motherboad; i had the same trouble with my kr7a raid. even if i ran the board with just cpu, mem and vid i still had the issue. this is on a 431w enermax so i find it hard to say that the powersuply was an issue. also note that some asus boards had issues as well but asus was cool enough to fix it in their bios.

I'll second this.
Sometimes even with solid power from the power supply, the motherboard power circutry is crappy enough to cause problems... I ran into this on an old 440BX board I tried to make a 9700 run on... Had plenty of power, but the mobo couldn't handle the draw.

[mustrum]

Well sure it is my motherboard because the PSU i used had GREAT specs on each rail not only high wattage.

It's only funny the problerm got solved by using a weak PSU.
It seemed like the AGP port couldn't power up fast enough when i had that problem.
I know that some motherboards have this issue but i fixed it and there's no logic behind my fix. :D

Well i played whole day and it's rocksolid so i wont complain.
Spent 60 euros for a PSU that is better but useless though. :D
Well i can use the card without errors now and wont complain.

The best card i used since the 3dfx voodoo 1.
I never get why pl complain about ATI drivers.
Had a lot nVidia cards and drivers always sucked.
If you want to play a new game you need a new detonator.
With the new det the old games wont run mostly tho. LOL

ATI drivers seem to be nice so far.

[Goragoth]

I just have to say this: in my experience Nvidia drivers are still much better than ATI's. Don't want to start a flame war and its off-topic anyways but I have never had a single problem with my Nvidia cards (TNT2, GF4Ti4200) but after only a few days using my new R9700Pro I've run into a few problems. Like the stupid DDC monitor info thing that didn't let me switch into higher than 1024x768 at more than 60hz. Easy fix for it sure but I had to look it up on the net and its such a common problem that is just stupid that ATI haven't done anything. I've also had crashes in Morrowind and even a BSOD due to ATI drivers (at least it said something about a crash in the ati2d.dll or something). Actually I kind of suspect overheating being the culprit since its summer and hot and I'm running a cheap Powercolor R9700Pro (that uses cheap ram as I've heard) together with a AthlonXP2100+ and 2 7200rpm 120gig HDDs all with only 1 case fan. Hmm. Yeah, anyway the refresh rate thingy was stupid but heck I wouldn't go back to the GF4 even if the drivers are slightly better, the R9700 is a great card.

Oh yeah, one more thing: the Cat3.1 drivers seem to have major issues with DX7. I know this because I tried to run Severance and couldn't get it to work until I found a OpenGL renderer on the net. I hope ATI fix this soon. 8)

[kyleb]

humm i would guess that was probably an issue with Severance alone as i have played my fair share of dx7 titles and even theif which is dx6 on the cat3.1's.

also, all drivers have problems, it is just a matter of if they effect what you are useing them for or not. :wink:

[Goragoth]

Hmmm, so not a general DX7 issue then? There is also a problem with WildTangent that it doesn't render textures and this can be fixed switching to a DX5 renderer so I guess I jumped to conclusions...

I've just had more problems with the ATI drivers in the few days I've used them than ever with Nvidia drivers, though come to think of it older Nvidia drivers have horrible artifacts in UT2k3 so its not like they are perfect :)

I think the biggest issue is that until recently Nvidia totally dominated the market and devs could get away with coding/testing only for Nvidia cards. I'm guessing we won't see any issues on new games since the R9700 is so popular. I can't say that I have a problem with the current drivers, they work fine. Just a few annoyances (like the refresh thingy). I love being able to play games at high rez with AA and AF enabled so heck, I can forgive something as trivial as that.

[kyleb]

yep, the fact that nvidia domintated the market has a lot to do with it. i rember back when everyone said nvidia drivers sucked and 3dfx were the untouchable ones. people can be fools some times. :roll:

and omg you brought up WT, those guys constantly played cs with me way back in the days of the betas but i lost track of them when the server went down for a while. i need to bug them to drop by for a reunion.