DONT USE AN ADDITIONAL PSU TO POWER YOUR X800 CARDS!!!

[stasiu]

I was having great luck with my X800 XT last night....i stuck a socket A copper heatsink on it and was getting clocks of 615/614 3D stable. I noticed that i could finish a 3D run with higher card clocks when my CPU wasn't overclocked. I thought my Antec TB 550 might be hitting it's limit, so i decided to hook up a second PSU to run some peripheral's. Well....then i got the great idea to plug my Enermax into the molex socket on the vid card. As soon as i flipped the switch on the Enermax, i heard a pop . Now all i get is the message telling me that my vid card isn't plugged in, even though it is and the 12v/5v lines are hot. I hate to send this card out for RMA because i've had great luck with it....i hope i can RMA it ASAP.

[boshi]

I suppose it tries to use a ground through the AGP with voltage from the molex.

[Kunaak]

you may have killed the AGP slot.
test the videocard on anotherboard first.

[stasiu]

Oh...that would be good news...i'd rather change the board anyway. I'll try it on my other A64 tonight.

[enroscado]

The exact same thing happened to me.
Nothing wrong with the AGP slot, just my x800xt died.

[STEvil]

Odd.. i've done that with several ati cards (not x8 series though) and not had problems other than when one psu didnt like being hooked up to a source that could feed it voltages...

antecs really dont like doing that, for furture reference

[r3b0rN]

i dont understand? u cant use 2 psu's for 1 rig with ati cards?

[STEvil]

not with antec psu's.

Enermax for system and a generic AT psu is what I used before...

[masterofpuppets]

OUCH! Hope it was just the motherboard that died and not your x800.

[k|ngp|n]

Same thing happened to me about a month ago. I was doing some testing on my sapphire x800xt and modded psu(5.37v line) and I plugged the card in with the pwer supply turned on ( careless mistake) and pop.....card was dead and I got the same error about not being plugged in.
That was a sad night I won't forget soon :/


Be careful with those XT's...........power connectors or something within realm of power regulation seems to be flaky on them. I have seen others having similar problems

[Saffire]

Same thing happened to me Although I didn't do anything out of the norm (PSU was switched off, etc etc)

k|ngp|n, did you RMA yours? If so how fast did you get it back? (Sent mine off for RMA Friday or Saturday, can't remember which day)

[StormPC]

Turnaround is usually a week to 10 days max. Fastest I've ever seen was 5 business days, but that was overnight shipping too.

[Saffire]

Hrm, would it be any slower because of the high demand of these things?

[stasiu]

Well i wish someone else would have posted this sooner...i wouldn't have made that mistake then. I hope this saves someone elses card. By the way...i tried the card in another board and all i get is a black screen....the card is smoked.

[eva2000]

woah lucky i read this as i was gonna add 2nd psu to keep my 550W Antec TC psu company! phew!

[stasiu]

I've had some bad luck this week. I had one Raptor just die on me. I'm sending back some OCZ EB's that clock for crap, they won't even run 2.5-x-x-x at any FSB and max out 235 3-2-2-8 prime stable. Now this card goes. That's over $1k worth of hardware . I guess when it rains...it pours.

[masterofpuppets]

Ouch! Huge loss there.

[GaNgY]

Thats odd i'm using an Antec 480 Trueblue and an Antec 550 Truepower and all works fine... i even had the vid card on 1 and the rest on other at a time and it worked fine

[lalPOOO]

ARhhh. Guess what happened to me...

I was testing out the sense line mod on my power supply, and had everything unplugged (except of course my x800, because I'm stupid) powered it up, and suddenly noticed that the fan on my x800pro was running, as was a fan attached to a motherboard header. After taking in the magical moment I suddenly realized that I had essentially just dropped the soap.

So its not just if you try to use a different power supply, its if the card gets ANY power through it molex connector while the rest of the system is off.

[IvanAndreevich]

So does anyone know why this problem is with Antec PSUs especially?

[saaya]

made it a sticky and changed title to warn people as several cards have died due to this already.

[boshi]

it kinda makes sense tho, it tries to ground the power from one PSU into the ground of the other, which causes bad times.

[aoc007]

Slightly off topic but do you guys think my system could be overloading my PC P&C 510w? Specs in sig.

Ive been getting hard drive corruption on my second (data) raid 0 array and need to run checkdisk everytime i startup, I'm not sure what it is, I doubt its the power maybe drivers?

This has all been happening since I reformatted when I installed my 6800, I used new RAID drivers and switched bios around a couple times between the hipro22 and 25 ic7 bioses.

[spaceman]

Seems like if you used the secondary PSU for your fans & drives, and left everything else hooked up normally, it should be OK. I think I'll choose NOT to be the guinea pig for this test tho.

[stasiu]

I have done that just fine before just fine, running any large fans, optical drives, and HD's off of a second PSU. Just make sure that the PSU powering the X800 is also plugged into the 12 volt and ATX sockets on you motherboard.