digideath

Hi.
I am looking for a little advice with my system/mobo. I had to replace my power pack recently and hit a problem with the one I bought.
The mobo is an am2 x2 Asus m2n4-sli board. It uses a 24 pin power connector and the 4 pin 12 volt connector. Problem is the power pack that I bought is a 650 watt psu that has only a 20 pin connector and the 4 pin 12 volt. I remembered being able to run a board like this with a 20 pin connector in the past and fitted the 20 pin power connector in the proper slots with the 12 volt connector fitted properly.
Result is the system is running and seems to be operating normally. I Monitored the voltages and benchmarked the system, all seems to run ok.
Question is, is it safe to run the board in this configuration seeing as four pins from the 24 pin connector are missing? It certainly seems to operate ok. The system is very stable and extremely fast.

digideath

To add to this, the missing pins are shown as the following in my mobo manual, in this order.

+5v +12v
Ground +3v

mattlock

The short answer is, yes it's safe, but not recommended.
What power supply did you buy? For a 650w to have only a 20pin connector it must be an older model unit, or a very cheap, low quality unit.

digideath

Hi mattlock.
Psu was a cheap nasty effort. Couldn't afford nothing better at the moment. Need to wait a month. I was just trying to get my system running again temporarily.
What problems would I see from running the system like this? I have good hardware so I assume it wouldn't be worth the risk running the system like this.

digideath

May I actualy ask a different question of people? What psu and power rating would people recomend for my system? My budget is real tight due to christmas coming and being a parent and all so what would people recomend.
I figure that my system requires about 650 watt due to the amount of stuff I have in my rig, feeding off the 12 volt. 12 items in total. Then there's the power rating of my gfx. A 512 meg 7950 gt. There's also a dual core am2 x2 cpu in there, 2 gig of ram and an xfi audio card.

mattlock

You might experience some system instablility, especially during graphics intense apps.

As for PSU recommendation. The Antec Trio 650w is a fine unit and is on sale at several locations right now.

Compusa has it for $70 after $50 rebate free shipping. Sale ends today.

Newegg has it for $80 after rebate free shipping. Weekend special.

Microcenter $80 after $25 rebate. Rebate offer good through 10/28/07.

digideath

Ok. Thanx for the advice mattlock. I had an antec in the rig previously. It was a good psu. It got damaged when my floppy drive blew. Caused it to frequently fail and trip the mobo's safety's, while booting the system.

linderman

mwave.com click on the refurbished button in the website navigation bar / then click on the continue button / then click on "power supplies and cases"


there is an Antec Trio 650 in there for $50.00 you wotn beat that


I have found thru several purchases, these are production overstock or similar >>>>> they come in retail boxes with all literature and packaging

mattlock

You're welcome.

Keep in mind, the only Antec PSUs worth buying are the Seasonic made units. The Trio (best option) NeoHE, and Earthwatts. Don't waste your money on thier other offerings.

linderman

Very good point Matt! thats a bullseye suggestion

mattlock

Thanks Joe.

Digideath, be aware that if you opt for the refurbished unit from Mwave it might not come with a warranty from Antec, Mwave states only a 15day warranty.

digideath

Thanx for the information. I've been looking for a new trio or earthwatts psu but hit problems with them.
I'm in the u.k so I've had to find an outlet that deals in pounds or euro's and ships to the U.K. I found the trio no problem but the cheapest I could find the 650 watt trio for is £80 which is about $163. More than I can afford just now.
The earthwatts, I couldn't find one above 500 watt. That cost £53/$108. Best I could find for the neo-he was 550 watts at £70/$142.

I had a friend recommend a psu thats on sale on a parts site I use regular. Psu is an OCZ StealthXStream 600w Silent SLI Ready ATX2 psu. It's going for £53/$108.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...odid=CA-023-OC

Would this be an ok psu to use? I could just afford this on tuesday and the fact that it is sli ready is very usefull as is the amount of fittings.
If it's not any use, I can wait 2 weeks longer and then I would be able to afford the antec trio one they have.
I wouldn't get a refurbished one. I make it a general rule to buy new every time, especially when its a psu.

linderman

I personally would wait the two weeks until you could afford the antec 650

digideath

I managed to sweet talk the wife in to letting me spend more money. I've ordered an antec truePower trio 650W. Got it from overclockers uk. Cost a fair bit but at least I know that I'll be using one the experts recomended. It's not as fancy as the one my m8 tried to talk me in to buying but it should be more than up to the job.

That information was spot on mattlock. I tried to run a couple of old games that were already installed, thinking I might get away with it as they arn't exactly demanding of the system. Grandia 2 and FF8. Both worked ok previously but failed with the 20 pin config. Got the intro's and all but the screen went black and locked the computer when I tried to load my save point. Computer couldn't be recovered. Had to push the reset button on my tower to get the system back. These games arn't exactly gfx intense but still caused the system to become unstable to the point of crashing the os.

Thanx again for taking the time and thanx for the good advice. Consider this thread solved and close it if needed.

mattlock

Glad to hear you ordered the Trio. We'll leave the thread as is until you get the new PSU installed, and you verify that your system is stable. So post back at that time.

nuttyape

dude if you live near a maplins electronics store pop in there you can a 500 watt psu for around £30. i have a single core :/ lol 1gig ram 2 1650pros in crossfirs xfire 3 hard dirves and a dvd/cd rw drive with a load of lights and fans on the case plus thermal sensors fan controls ect and i only use (acording to some tree saving power program thingy) i only use 300 watts of power. i can run games like crysis NO PROBLEM so the rig is obvestly kinda beefy so needs some juice to run it. i got a ocz 500 watt psu for £30. brand new and shiney hell of good quality one too not cheep and made of tin. tryu in there im not sure if they havew a website. but if you can get to the shop. its worht a try:)

mattlock

The days of buy a Brand name PSU and thinking you're in good shape are long gone, and while the OCZ GameXtreme is a decent unit the StealthXstream is not.

digideath

Ok. Psu came yesterday and system isn't fully stable. A few issues have came up. System has changed in so many ways. Some for the good others not.
Several quirks of the system from previous have vanished ( recharge function for my mouse's docking station finally behaves ) plus the system is faster and smoother than the previous antec ??? Perhaps the old antec hadn't been working right from day one.

Fist "off" thing I noticed was the cpu vcore had jumped up a good deal from normal. Vcore rating for my cpu is 1.3v. It had always previously peaked at 1.26v even with the 20 pin psu. It now peaks at 1.36v. An increase of 0.1v although I know thats not dangerous.

Several apps started failing. Event viewer has logs of these failures. All point to ntdll.dll being the faulting module. Thats in the xp x64 os.
This is an example of the type of failure message I am talking about.
System restarted by itself. It was on the desktop one second then it was at post the next. No windows is closing page. Rebooted os and thankfully there was no "windows has recovered from a serious error" message. Checked with event viewer and found an entry saying winlogon32.exe had initiated a restart but again I stress, windows didn't close. The system just restarted.

I used the board's built in auto function in the ai overclocker to give a system lift of 1% with the old antec. Obviously with the cheap unbranded 20 pin psu I had removed this. I tried to re-apply with the new psu and it caused the system to become unstable to the point of locking the desktop. It had been stable with the old antec but it doesn't work with the new psu. I only saw the instability in windows though. I removed the overclock to get the system stable gain.

Sorry for posting all this but you did want to know if the system was stable or not. There is other stuff but I think this info should be enough to get an idea of whats going on. I understand that the problems don't indicate hardware failure. Looks more like the os damage or malware to me.

Edit:- Forgot to add that the voltages and temps had been very stable through all this. I logged the full works.

linderman

I think your OS is shell shocked >>>>> I hate to say it, but now that your hardware is smooth again, its time for the dreaded clean install of your OS


as soon as you get the OS installed with all patches and updates and antivirus etc make an image of it, at least then if you have to start over in the future, you can save yourself about 4 hours of pure bliss