It is all about power and memory!

A cautionary tale. A couple of weekends ago I decided to upgrade the family PC. General idea was to go from a 7950 to 8800 graphics card, add a bit of memory, get a nice 22inch widescreen monitor and drop in a larger system drive (250g WD Caviar). First off the block was the disc, ghoasting with Seagates tools worked great. Went from an 80 to a 250 gig drive with no drama. Next task was to drop in the new graphics card, 2 more gig of memory and then all done. Not!

Unpacked the Asus EN880GT 1GB, looked great, installed it, beep beep beep! mmmm, must be the way I mounted it. No not that. Next take it back to the shop, they put it in a handy chassis, worked first time.mmmm Back home, maybe it was not compatable with my P5W DH motherboard. Did not like the slow boot and did not use the DH features, so back to the shop and got a P5K PRO, guaranteed to work said the shop guy. But no, same three beeps. mmmm

On to the internet, seems to be a number of power problems with the card, at least problems in getting enough powner out of a power supply. I had a Silverstone 750W, should be no problem. But running out of ideas, back to the shop I go. One Coolmaster 650 watt later and the card comes alive, boots and everything. Great all solved.

No quite, after several minutes in any 3D application the system either BSOD or the application is closed nicely by Vista. MMMMMmmmmMMmmm. Back to the internet, lots of issues with the 8800GT to do with heat. Ok, probably time to upgrade the chassis fans. Back to the shop, while there noticed a GPU cooler, ok lets go to an OEM cooler for the GPU (after having failed to get any utility to tell me what the GPU temp was).

Back home, off with the Asus Glacier cooler, on with the huge cooper twin fan connect direct to Molex 12v version. Nice blue light on it as well. Guess what, no difference, but at lease AI Prob now tells me my motherboard and CPUs are nice and cool. But the thing still only lasts 5 or so minutes in a 3D game. Tried upgrading all drivers again, just in case, no nothing doing. MMMmmmmmmm.

OK, why not re-install Visa, a real hastle given the number of applications that I have installed when the P5K Pro was installed. Just before the upgrade I decided to take out the memory that I have installed alongside the EN8800GT. Took out the non branded stuff that had been in the machine for sometime, leaving in 2gig of Kingston, really confused now, the machine refused to boot! Mmmmmmm. Ok took out the Kingston, replaced it with the OEM, and booted fine. This started me thinking, lets try FSX see if it now works, and yep it is fine, so is Crysis and everything else.

So, the moral of this story of stupidity is, you need a lot of power for a EN8800GT 1GB, if not all you will have is an expensive way to produce three beeps. The second moral is to check whatever changes you made before assuming the worst. If you have a EN8800GT that fails (BSOD or Visa application error) check your memory.

I knew all this stuff before, just did not apply it.

On the good news side, I now have a rock solid P5K Pro (without the P5W slow boot nonsense) with a great graphics card (out of warrantee due to the OEM cooler) and a nice fast 250G systems disc.

Yep, power supply with not enough and faulty memory stick