It's worth noting that not all power supplies supply the wattage they are rated for. There has been a fair amount of debate about this in hardware/overclocking circles lately. The consensus is that basically only the Antec TruePower series is really good at supplying the right wattage, cleanly (really important for Athlons).

So just because your PSU is rated for 400w doesn't mean it's supplying it. Pay particular attention to the current ratings. A regular Athlon, as I understand it, draws it's power off of the +5V rail, and can draw anything up to about 37A (!). Specifications for your chip are available on AMD's site.

It just goes to show that you're better off buying a really good, name brand PSU. Aopen's are ok, I think, but the best are Antec and Enermax, as I understand it. Both of which possibly aren't available from your average corner store, but are online (I use eyo.com.au and computermarket.com.au). These aren't cheap (A top-of-the-line Antec is about $210)

HTH,

Matt

At 16:13 11/08/2003, Jeff Waugh wrote:
<quote who="Jamie Wilkinson">

> This one time, at band camp, Gonzalo Servat wrote:
> > Any other suggestions? It has one other defect where you sometimes have
> > to press the reset button a number of times before you actually get
> > video output which leads me to believe maybe it is the motherboard.
>
> It could be that a 400W psu still doesn't cut it.  You may actually need a
> 600W psu.

Wow. I'm running a dual-Athlon on 400W; 2 disks, DVD, three or four PCI
cards. It was very unhappy on 350W, but hasn't missed a beat due to power
issues with 400W (though it's not incredibly robust when there's a flicker).

I'd be looking at the motherboard too, annoying as it is. :-|

- Jeff

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