Antec Earthwatt 500 Power - Concerns about my system

[NevoGamer]

Hi folks. I built a new system a little over a month ago and have yet to get it stable. Here what I have:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4 rev2.0
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Conroe 2.66GHz LGA 775 Processor (stock heat sync/fan)
CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3250410AS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
BFG Tech BFGE86256GTOCFE GeForce 8600GT 256MB Video Card
ANTEC ea500 earth watts 500w power supply
Windows Vista Home Premium

I was looking at my power stats under PC Wizard 2008 (nice tool), and was concerned about my +3.3V number and my +12V number.

Here are my numbers:

Monitoring Chip : ITE IT8718F
Voltage CPU : 1.10 V
DIMM : 3.25 V
+3.3V Voltage : 2.22 V
+5V Voltage : 4.91 V
+12V Voltage : 13.71 V
VTT : 2.22 V
VBAT : 3.23 V

I'll have to admit, I don't know a lot about power consumption in PCs. Are these numbers correctable through the BIOS or is the only choice a new/different power supply?

 

[newnerd]

Hello NevoGamer:
Just for comparison......I have the same PSU on my pc with Q6600 cpu, 4 GBs DDR2 PC 6400, 2x 500 GB & 2x 320 GB Sata H.D.s, onboard audio/video, stock cpu cooler, 2 120 mm case fans, 1 cd drive, 1 DVD/CD sata multi-drive, floppy drive. My voltage readings using Intel's Desktop Utilities 3.0 are:
+12v..................12.228-12.286 V
+5v.................... 4.933-4.958 V
+3.3v................. 3.203-3.230 V
+1.5v................. 1.243-1.253 V
Processor Vccp.... 1.074-1.102 V

I'm guessing that your readings may not be accurate. They are WAY to far off approved voltages on the +3.3v and the +12v. Perhaps you should try using another psu monitoring program and see if it gives you voltages within the allowable variations.

newnerd

 

[newnerd]

Forgot to mention.......you could check in your bios and see if it gives you voltage readings that vary much from the ones you got with PC Wizard 2008. I don't have a lot faith in the accuracy of software cpu voltage monitoring.

 

[newnerd]

Here is Antec's webpage with the PSU parameters:

>http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=27500<

 

[NevoGamer]

Have any other suggestions for a utility program to acquire voltage readings? I can't use the Intel utility since it's for Intel mobos only.

 

[sincraft]

Yea your 3v is WAY off and your 12 v is too high by a bit.

If I were you I would get a multimeter and test your Power Supply or, take it somewhere to be tested (not a freak squad or chain store...a REAL computer store), or just replace it. Not worth the risk.

Be sure to check if that software you are using is giving weird readings for anyone else. And as someone else said, look all throughout your bios, you 'should' be able to check this information out through the bios. If in the bios it has the same numbers, then you need to shut down adn replace that thing before it kills your system.

S

 

[newnerd]

I think if the voltages reported in the bios are within the parameters shown on the Antec website that it may be possible that the nVidia graphics card drivers may be causing the instability on your pc. I have another pc with an nVidia PCIE graphics card and Vista Home Premium and it is no where near as stable as my Vista Ultimate pc using onboard graphics. I've updated the graphics driver several times following their exact instructions and never have been able to get that pc to run like the one using onboard graphics. Also, I note in your component description that you might be using 4 GB of RAM........The maximum Vista will recognize is 3 GB if you are using the 32 bit O.S. I don't think that using 4 GB will cause problems in 32-bit but you might try removing a couple of sticks and see if that improves things?