Video Card Upgrade and Power Supply Question

[Orikes]

For quite a while, I've been pondering upgrading my video card. If I were playing anything other than Sims2, it would probably be fine. But, since I have a nice shiny Nvidia card, I get to experience the joy of the BSOD of I don't have usershaders off.

The problem I'm running into is that I am getting overwhelmed looking at the various video cards. I don't know what's going to be a worthy upgrade in my price range (preferrably under $200) and still work with the power supply I've got in my machine.

The video card I'm currently running is: EVGA 256-P2-N389-AX GeForce 6800GS 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported.
The power supply in my machine is a 400W one.

I can easily find comparable ATI cards, but going upward at all, I'm not sure what might make my power supply wheeze and die.

Advice? Pretty please?

[Hegelian]

You need to post the model and specs for the power supply. Wattage is less important than amps, regulation, and efficiency.

I suggest you read through this article:  Best Gaming Graphics Cards: February 2008. It covers the entire price range.

A few things to be aware of:

If you change from an nVidia board to an ATI board (or vice versa), you will need to boot into safe mode and remove every trace of the old drivers before you remove the old board and install the new one. ATI used to offer a tool for this, but afaik nVidia never has, so you may need a third-party tool, like Driver Cleaner. Even if you go from nVidia to nVidia, you may still need to remove all the old driver files before installing the new board.

If you have an older motherboard with an AGP slot, be aware that a lot of users are reporting significant problems with the drivers for the AGP versions of ATI's new HD series boards.

Many of the mid- to high-end PCI-E boards require a special power connector, so you will need either a new power supply or an adapter of some sort.

New power supplies come with a 20 + 4 motherboard connector for the current generation of motherboards. If you have an older board with a 20-pin connector, the +4 part can be separated or folded out of the way. This looks similar to the classic four-pin P4 connector, but it is different, and you cannot connect this to the P4 power socket on your older motherboard. There will be a separate P4 connector that should be marked as such in some way.

You may need to set aside USD50—80 for a new power supply. Some of the newer video boards draw more power than the CPU.

If you are in the US and can buy from Newegg:

This Corsair is a nice unit for the price (with rebate); I put one in Reggikko's PC last fall.

If you need a few more watts, this Antec Earthwatts unit is only $10 more; I put one of these in the PC of another member of the household a couple months ago.

This SeaSonic unit is virtually the same as the Antec, for the same price as the Corsair (due to a larger discount than the Antec receives).

To the best of my knowledge, all three of these PSUs are manufactured by SeaSonic, and they all qualify under the 80+ initiative for high efficiency. The more efficient your power supply, the fewer watts you need for the same power delivery to your components, the less power is drawn from the wall, and the less heat is pumped into your room.

You might be surprised at how many computer problems—including graphics issues—can be solved by a power-supply upgrade. The PSU may possibly be the most important component in your case, and is usually the crappiest if you haven't built the machine yourself.

[Orikes]

You are always an amazing font of information, Hegelian.

Everything in the computer was bought at NewEgg just under two years ago. I had a friend put it together for me. I watched and I understand most of the basics, but it's still a bit intimidating. I've replaced video cards before, but never power supplies.

Either way, the machine has a COOLMAX "EZ Wire" CU-400T ATX 400W Power Supply. Here's the link to it on NewEgg: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16817159047. Most of the specs mean nothing to me. I was told it was a pretty good power supply, but I have no idea what that really means in terms of upgrading the video card.

My motherboard does not have an AGP slot for a video card. Only the PCIe. It's a ASUS A8N5X 939 NVIDIA nForce4 ATX AMD board. Hrm. In looking that up, I just realized it's a board geared towards Nvidia cards. Does this mean I can't put an ATI card on it at all or it's just a pain in the arse?

I'm currently running only 1GB of ram (Crucial 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory), and I know that's something relatively easy to upgrade. I can get another 1GB of that same ram (for the empty two slots I've got) to give me a total of 2GB, or I can go crazy and do a complete upgrade to 4GB. I know that helps with the BSOD issue, but only masks the problem.

[Argon]

I've found that if you have 1 or two extra 4-pin power connectors coming off your power supply and aren't using any splitter/extensions then you should be fine. It doesn't hurt having extra wattage (I have a 500 watt for example) it just means your power supply won't be running at full capacity and therefore won't be producing as much heat.

You should be fine installing an ATI video card on your motherboard, it's just better to have an Nvidia because it can work with the nForce4 chipset to adjust everything for optimal performance. That's mostly for overclocking and temperature control though.

Have you tried using the Xtreme-G drivers? I've been using that  on my desktop and laptop and haven't had any BSOD problems, make sure anti-aliasing is set to application controlled though. Performance is better using the in-game slider bar anyway

[Hegelian]

You are always an amazing font of information, Hegelian.

 

Either way, the machine has a COOLMAX "EZ Wire" CU-400T ATX 400W Power Supply. Here's the link to it on NewEgg: http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16817159047. Most of the specs mean nothing to me. I was told it was a pretty good power supply, but I have no idea what that really means in terms of upgrading the video card.

If I were in your situation, I would start by upgrading the power supply. It really isn't adequate for modern motherboards, being designed for older—old even—motherboards with ISA slots. How do I know this? Well, let's look at the specs:

+3.3V@30A
+5V@40A
+12V@18A
-5V@1A
-12V@1A
+5VSB@2.5A

Without going into an excess of detail, let's just say that these voltages represent the power feeds to different components in your PC:

• The +12V "rail" powers newer CPUs, devices like hard drives that use the large four-pin Molex connectors, and PCI-E slots and connectors.
• The +5V rail powers the PCI slots, the floppy drive, and older CPUs like the PIII, and also contributes to devices that use those big Molex plugs.
• The +3.3V rail powers RAM, the AGP slot, and some motherboard components.
• The -5V rail powers ISA slots.

So what does this mean? Note the whopping 40 amps on the +5V rail. You have only three PCI slots and you may not even have a floppy drive; you certainly don't have a Pentium III CPU. Therefore, 40A is overkill.

On the other hand, your +12V rail is powering your hard drives and optical drives, the CPU, and your PCI-E graphics board as well (and PCI-E boards draw considerably more wattage than do AGP boards), but can only offer up 18 amps (and note the efficiency of this unit is only about 65%, which is pretty poor). 18A for the +12V rail in this PC is woefully insufficient; you would like at least 30A, and doubling to 36A wouldn't be bad.

30 amps for the +3.3V rail is fine.

The -5V rail is useless, since that pin (18) on your motherboard is a ground line, not -5V, because there are no ISA slots on your motherboard.

This is a surprisingly expensive power supply considering its age and low efficiency; presumably what you're paying for are the modular cables, which, all else being equal, is not really a good idea because you lose some efficiency at the connections.

So what do you want? Your graphics board requires the 6-pin PCI-E power connection, so presumably it draws some significant power. You don't say what else you have in your PC but I'm guessing only one hard drive, one or two optical drives, and perhaps a modem, but no plug-in sound board or networking card. Even if you have a bit more than this, a quality unit in the 500W range should do the trick—I'm running three 10K rpm SCSI hard drives, two optical drives, a floppy drive, a modem, a sound card, a 2.8GHz Pentium IV, 2 GB RAM, an overclocked ATI X800GTO video board, and a bunch of case fans (and, until recently, a SCSI tape drive) with a 510W PSU from PC Power & Cooling with no problems whatsoever.   

Something like this SeaSonic SS-500ES ATX12V 2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 500W Power Supply would be a good choice, rated at >80% efficiency and with two 17A +12V rails (some would argue that single 34A rail would be better, but the latest ATX spec calls for two +12V rails, one for the motherboard and CPU and the other for peripherals). This is currently US$70 ($30 discount) with free shipping from Newegg. This is the same unit as the Antec Earthwatts EA500 for $10 less. Of course, if you're not in the US you'll need to find another supplier. Brands to look for are SeaSonic, some Antec (Earthwatts, for example), Corsair, Enermax, and PC Power & Cooling. There are a lot of really crappy power supplies on the market, so beware!

Here are the specs for the SeaSonic (note the absence of a -5V rail):

+5V@24A
+3.3V@24A
+12V1@17A
+12V2@17A
-12V@.8A
+5VSB@2.5A

If a new PSU designed for your hardware doesn't fix the problem, you may then wish to consider changing the graphics board. Wasn't the 6800 series among the nVidia products that had so many driver problems when running TS2? You may want to do a search of this site to see what you can turn up, as there was quite a bit of discussion about this and which driver versions to use.