AMD 64 3500+ 939pin!

[Dr.Doom]

I am buying a new computer on friday spec will be

AMD 64 3500+ 939 pin
Asus A8V Deluxe VIA K8T800Pro GB
1GB kingston DDR400
Asus 9600XT 128mb <run out of money was going for 9800 pro>
Networking card, Sound on board

Will 350v be enough to run it keep in mind I will probably upgrade to 9800 pro or X800 when I get the money.I only got the 9600 XT cause it had HL2 free and it was really cheap.If anyone is wondering is the 3500+ is worth it I will gladly tell you.

 

[Nite_Hawk]

I am buying a new computer on friday spec will be

AMD 64 3500+ 939 pin
Asus A8V Deluxe VIA K8T800Pro GB
1GB kingston DDR400
Asus 9600XT 128mb <run out of money was going for 9800 pro>
Networking card, Sound on board

Will 350v be enough to run it keep in mind I will probably upgrade to 9800 pro or X800 when I get the money.I only got the 9600 XT cause it had HL2 free and it was really cheap.If anyone is wondering is the 3500+ is worth it I will gladly tell you.

Er, do you mean a 350 watt power supply? If so, it all depends on how much power is being delivered on the 12v line.

For a 350W power supply, you are probably getting 15 amps on the 12 volt line. An athlon 64 3500+ is going to draw something like a max of maybe 80 or 90 watts (90W/12V = ~7.5A). Figure about 8 amps for this to be on the safe side. For a X800, figure maybe another 4 or 5 amps. Now, also keep in mind that each drive (HDs, CD/DVD) get power from the 12 volt line too, along with any 12 volt fans. Figure maybe about 1 amp for each drive, and maybe an amp for all of the fans combined.

Your left with something between about 15-20 amps depending on how many drives, fans, and case LEDs you have. This is a worse case scenario, but you are probably going to be pushing your 350W too hard under load.

You have a couple of options. You could get a 420W thermaltake Purepower off newegg.com for $36 right now which has an 18 amp 12 volt line. This would probably work out ok so long as you don't have too many drives your system. If video card and cpu power usage continue to climb though, it's not going to be enough in the coming generations.

Personally, I just bought the 500 watt coolmax power supply from newegg which has 28 amps on the 12v line. (should hopefully be enough to last through the next couple of generations of processors and video cards). Looked like it had fairly stable voltages from the reviews I have seen too, and it's only $56 which isn't much more than the TT 420W.

Nite_Hawk

 

[Dio]

I just built a 3800+, A8V with a 350W and a 9800 Pro. One harddrive, one case fan. Zero problems. The CWT has 16A on 12V line, IIRC.

X800 doesn't draw significantly more power than 9800.

Personally, I've never seen a PC that needed more than a 350W power supply - even with 3 hard drives, a fast P4, RDRAM, and a X800 XT PE. But that's just me.

 

[Tahir2]

If you happen to own a really crappy 350W PSU then you are in trouble.

Someone I know (TM) forgot that they had an old 300W Codegen PSU in a test rig when they put in an A64 3000+ and K8S8X mobo for testing. It took about 40 seconds to go 'bang'.

 

[epicstruggle]

I am buying a new computer on friday spec will be

AMD 64 3500+ 939 pin
Asus A8V Deluxe VIA K8T800Pro GB
1GB kingston DDR400
Asus 9600XT 128mb <run out of money was going for 9800 pro>
Networking card, Sound on board

Will 350v be enough to run it keep in mind I will probably upgrade to 9800 pro or X800 when I get the money.I only got the 9600 XT cause it had HL2 free and it was really cheap.If anyone is wondering is the 3500+ is worth it I will gladly tell you.

If i was u, id wait for msi neo2(name?). They will be offering a much better mb. Asus ive hear has had some problems with agp/pci lock. Anandtech has a nice review of 939 mb's and msi's offering is the best of the pack. Only problem is that it wont be on sale for a few more days.

epic

 

[Nite_Hawk]

I just built a 3800+, A8V with a 350W and a 9800 Pro. One harddrive, one case fan. Zero problems. The CWT has 16A on 12V line, IIRC.

X800 doesn't draw significantly more power than 9800.

Personally, I've never seen a PC that needed more than a 350W power supply - even with 3 hard drives, a fast P4, RDRAM, and a X800 XT PE. But that's just me.

Many top quality power supplies can run at or even outside of spec, but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea for long term use. With a single HD and single case fan you are probably "ok" at 16A (figure 9A for cpu, 4 for video card, and another 2-3 for drives and single fan). Still, it's cutting it closer than I'd personally perfer. If you wanted to add a couple of drives or a 6800Ultra card to that setup you'd probably be pushing your PS out of spec. Now granted there are 350W powersupplies like the enermax ones that have huge 12V lines (like 20-24A) which would be fine, but that's not the case with most.

Nite_Hawk

 

[Dio]

Fair enough. Most of the supplies I have here are Enermax, and almost every PC is single drive. I even have an Enermax 450W, bought in a futile attempt to get a very crappy motherboard stable, but currently sat on the floor doing nowt much.

 

[Helevitia]

Everything you ever wanted to know about the A8V.

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=328463


I'll summarize a few things for you.

Don't run your memory at the rated speed. The A64 has problems running aggressive memory timings. Check out this article to know what I am talking about.

Most Radeons have problems run in AGP8X so run it in 4X, though I did read that running smartgart and turning off AGP read and writes fixes the problem. I'm not sure why or at what cost though.

If you want to overclock, you need to run the 1005.02x BIOS in order to get the AGP/PCI locks. It's not guaranteed to be stable though.

My specs are:

Asus A8V
3500+
1GB Mushkin 222 Special running @ 232(because of the timings issue with the A64)
9700 Pro(running at 4X because all my games crash to the desktop in 8X)

Dave

EDIT: I forgot to mention that people are complaining about high performace hard drives(such as the raptor) getting data corruption because of the VIA chipset. That A8V link has another link to the issue about this. the link is near the end of the thread.

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

Need to know the amps on the 3.3V rail. The A64 pull hard on the 3.3V rail.

 

[mczak]

Need to know the amps on the 3.3V rail. The A64 pull hard on the 3.3V rail.

As you surely know, this is not determined by the cpu, but the on-board voltage regulator (and the board design). Last time I checked, pretty much all boards nowadays mostly use the +12V rail for the the cpu mostly. The only exception to this generally are some Athlon XP boards, which sometimes might not even have that additional 12V connector. I think any PSU you could buy, even the tiny 200W ones, would have plenty of power on the 3.3V and 5V rails for current boards / cpus (they might lack enough amperage on the 12V rail though certainly).

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

Need to know the amps on the 3.3V rail. The A64 pull hard on the 3.3V rail.

As you surely know, this is not determined by the cpu, but the on-board voltage regulator (and the board design). Last time I checked, pretty much all boards nowadays mostly use the +12V rail for the the cpu mostly. The only exception to this generally are some Athlon XP boards, which sometimes might not even have that additional 12V connector. I think any PSU you could buy, even the tiny 200W ones, would have plenty of power on the 3.3V and 5V rails for current boards / cpus (they might lack enough amperage on the 12V rail though certainly).

I have had problems with weak 3.3V rails with A64 setups and the PSU's had from 18A to 22A on the 12V rail so yes A64 do pull hard on the 3.3V rail. Make sure you have about 28A on the 3.3v rail and you should be fine.

 

[mczak]

I have had problems with weak 3.3V rails with A64 setups and the PSU's had from 18A to 22A on the 12V rail so yes A64 do pull hard on the 3.3V rail. Make sure you have about 28A on the 3.3v rail and you should be fine.

That is interesting. Typically only graphic card (up to 8A on 3.3V), motherboard itself and ram use 3.3V. Even back in the days when no separate 12V connector was available systems mostly used 5V, not 3.3V for cpu.
I know c't (german computer magazine) sometimes publishs power draw numbers for the individual rails when testing motherboards, but those few magazines I've here around unfortunately don't have any board tests...

 

[Rodéric]

I'm interested in AMD64 CPUs, anyone can point me to an article (or more) about power consumptions of those ?
(So I make sure everything is fine for an upgrade)

 

[{Sniping}Waste]

I have had problems with weak 3.3V rails with A64 setups and the PSU's had from 18A to 22A on the 12V rail so yes A64 do pull hard on the 3.3V rail. Make sure you have about 28A on the 3.3v rail and you should be fine.

That is interesting. Typically only graphic card (up to 8A on 3.3V), motherboard itself and ram use 3.3V. Even back in the days when no separate 12V connector was available systems mostly used 5V, not 3.3V for cpu.
I know c't (german computer magazine) sometimes publishs power draw numbers for the individual rails when testing motherboards, but those few magazines I've here around unfortunately don't have any board tests...

I think the A64s on die mem controler feeds off the 3.3V rail. Many over clockers have fried there A64 at defalt Vcore but raised Vmem. The cpu would boot but would have large amouts of mem errors. By raising the Vmem, you also raise the voltage on the on die memery controler. This is not been proven fact yet but the info thats building points to it.

 

[mczak]

I think the A64s on die mem controler feeds off the 3.3V rail.

The athlon 64 does not have a direct 3.3V input, it has however VDDIO (according to datasheet "DDR SDRAM I/O ring power supply"), which is 2.5V - yes that's a likely candidate for being generated by the 3.3V rail. Datasheet though tells it is limited to 2.9A max for dual-channel Opterons, and 2.2A for single-/dual-channel A64 which isn't that much.

Many over clockers have fried there A64 at defalt Vcore but raised Vmem. The cpu would boot but would have large amouts of mem errors. By raising the Vmem, you also raise the voltage on the on die memery controler. This is not been proven fact yet but the info thats building points to it.

Well, the datasheet lists the absolute maximum rating of vddio (and you typically really don't want to exceed the maximum rating...) at 2.9V, so it might indeed be possible to kill it if you increase your memory voltage to more than that - imho a bios should not allow selecting values above the maximum rating, but maybe then reviews would complain "ooh baaaad overclocker doesn't even allow me to fry the chip within minutes!". People which really want to kill their chips for that 0.1% possible performance gain could still just hardware-mod it (which btw is much better for bragging rights, that "hardware-modded" tag looks so good in the system description...).

mczak

 

[Snoochems]

This upcoming Nforce 4... i have searched around for some info, and all i've found are statements from 'theinquirer'.
These guys, from past experiences, seems to just make BS up.
Is there any 'real' information about the nforce 4.
Does it have both AGP and PCI-E?