Halp Plez... Serious New PC Woes.

[Davros]

when all this is over I'll be sitting on a shitload of valid OS discs and keys lol becauuse they don't want them back!

Davros becomes the best friend of the highly intelligent and sexy Rainbow Man

 

[ShaidarHaran]

Did you ever get this worked out?
I thought about it a bit today in the context of my past Dell experiences. It sounds like you've added some hardware (substitute sound, other hard drives, etc.). I think this is your problem.

From my experience, Dell is ultra-efficient at spec'ing a PSU that handles exactly what they've put in a system - there's often no (zero) headroom for more. I once dropped a second hard disk into an OptiPlex and it fried the machines motherboard. Dell covered it under warranty but explained to me that, even though there was a space for the drive and a molex for power, the PSU couldn't handle another drive and the normal failure mode fried the motherboard.

So I would try one of two things:

1. take all your stuff out and test
or
2. take a second PSU and connect it to your two GPUs. Jumper green-to-black to enable it. Now power the GPUs with the external supply and the rest with your Dell supply and test.

Your past Dell experiences must be with extremely old systems. I've got a Circa November 2004 Dimension 4700 (which is by no means high-end) upon which I am typing this message. It came with an X300SE 128MB PCI-e card and 512MB DDR2 400. I swapped out the graphics card for an X1650XT 256MB, added a DVD-RW, and another 2GB DDR2 533. System is rock-solid under full load on a "305W" PSU (dual 18A +12V rails suggest it is anything but 305W).

RM: how much RAM do you have and which version of Vista are you running?

 

[Rainbow Man]

2GB Hyundai DDR2 800 and vista lutimate.

No overclocking anywhere except CPU which is warrantied to run at 3.46. But the system behaves the same at stcock speed too (2.67).
Peace.

 

[ShaidarHaran]

I don't suppose there's any chance you'd be able to install XP on the system...

The reason I ask is because my boss just built a new rig with an 8800 GTS 320 and he had nothing but problems in Vista, game corruption, poor performance, crashes constantly. He installed XP and hey, guess what - everything works fine!

 

[Rainbow Man]

Yea, as stated above. I'm waiting on Dell to get their thumb out and send me an XP license just to test with. I don't want to run XP forever though, been there done that for five years already.

Peace.