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My trusty Gainward 6600 card finally bit the dust today after a long session playing (well, trying to play) BioShock.
So, I nipped to ebay and bought myself a second hand geforce 7800GT, I usually do upgrades a step behind the latest cards so the 7800 was a good choice. I ran into a little problem though.
The card itself is PCI-E just like most new cards, it has its own power socket at the back of the card to give the card more power direct from the powersupply, however the motherboard itself also has an extra plug which also gives more power to the pco-express slot.
The question is, which one is the right one to use? Right now i have the powerplug into the card and I aint using the one on the board, the motherboard is the first run of Asus A8N-SLI.
Should i use the power going into the card itself...or use the power going in from the actual motherboard?
Firstly, FYI, here's the Asus pages for your board:
[uk.asus.com...]
Secondly, congrats, this is a very good board. You should really have bought a better GFX card to do it justice, but nevermind, the 7800 GTX is certainly respectable.
Anyways, on to your power problem...I'm not really sure what you mean by the power on the motherboard? The card will have a 6-pin PCI-E connector, whatever you do, don't ever power the PC without this connected.
I've checked the spec on the board and for a heavy loaded gamer it requires a 500w minimum PSU, I would go for a decent 600w, spend about 50 quid. If it's underrated you may notice system stability issues, and random crashes.
The board has what Asus call an EZ-plug, not seen it before but it is power related and only needed if you have 2 cards in an SLI setup.
Hope this is helpful, if not please can you describe your system in a bit more detail.
I just built a system for a client, didn't want to let it go. Intel Quad Core, Asus 680i SLI, 4Gb dual channel PC6400, 8800GTX, 2x 80Gb Seagate striped hard drives. It's the fastest thing I've ever seen - installed XP from scratch in 15 mins.
That video card required 2x PCI-E power plugs, and the board recommended 2x 12v CPU plugs. Luckily the PSU I bought was pretty heavy duty and had everything required.
Chris.
Yes it was the EZPlug i was talking about but from what you have said i dont need it plugged in after all since i am only using a single card and not SLI, thats what was confusing me :)
