MA78GM & Antec power supply incompatibilty?

You can purchase some sata converters to use with your regular 4 pin power supply leads. Newegg has a nippon 2 sata converter for $6.99 (under the heading "cables") plus shipping, or check your local computer stores.

Thanks for the suggestion. I already have some on order through eBay where they are listed as "ide to sata" cables or converters and cost $1-$2 each, including shipping. Locally, in Alaska, the computer stores are charging $8+ each. Jim

FWIW, today I talked with a couple PC technicians at the company I work for. One of them used to work a local computer shop. He experienced a similar problem a year or so ago -- a mid-range 500-600w PSU and his high-end, gaming PC bundle would not work. After a few days with his techie friends trying to troubleshoot everything on the motherboard/system, he installed a slightly more powerful PSU (same brand), and everything worked fine. Although the original PSU bench tested fine, there was some kind of unidentified incompatibility issue with the specific PSU/system. (It's nice to know that I'm not alone, I guess.) Jim

Jim, Could you tell me if you resolved your problem with this MB? I am having the same problem. CPU fan turns for a second and then stops.

Buy extra Molex/SATA cable thingies - they're cheap - I've got a small pile of defective ones from two different makers (and, the worst of it is - some are intermittent, work fine until twisted some particular way, and then croak... Very hard to diagnose - try 'em out of the case - fine; shovel the drives back in - no drive in discovery listing...)

No, I haven't resolved it yet.

I did get the Molex/SATA power cable converters and ran the system for awhile, copying large volumes of data from an IDE drive to the SATA drives which were/are configured as RAID1. Unfortunately, the system was not very stable and would lockup (grey blank screen without warning) every few minutes (10-30 minutes), requiring a hard reboot.

This may have been caused by the 200w PSU that I pulled from another PC being underpowered. Additional research revealed that many people have had difficulty with RAID controller chipset that is used on this board - so that's another possibility. Then, as bilbat has posted, it's possible the Molex/SATA power cable converters might be defective (but I would have expected a single drive simply to go offline as opposed to a system lockup.)

I contacted Gigabyte tech support. There response was "We are unable to verified your PSU, make sure it's ATX 2.0 compliant and it should not be an issue. Any ATX 2.0 or higher compliant PSU should be able to operate this board."

I haven't had time to work on this during the last couple of weeks, but I'll get back to it eventually. The question I now face is whether I want to try a different PSU (and, if so, what) or a different motherboard (since the RAID 1 capability was a major factor in selecting this motherboard to begin with) (and, if so, what?). [Several years ago I built several systems using the ASUS A7V133 motherboard with RAID 1 and they have worked fine. However, they are old, slow, and don't support SATA.]
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Lanesharon, would you please confirm what power supply unit you are using? Is it also an Antec TP3-430 or something else? That might help confirm whether this is a specific motherboard/PSU combination problem or whether a variety of PSUs are incompatible with the MA78GM. Thanks.

Using a DURO 400w PSU. I had forgotten that I had another AM2 system, in the closet, just in case.  

So, I tested the PSU and memory on that system (one at a time). They work fine. Tomorrow I will swap the CPU's and see if all is okay. After that, I think I may have a bad MB, AGAIN.  

Here's an update:

I replaced the borrowed 200w power supply with a Cooler Master Extreme Power Plus 460w -- that should eliminate any possible question regarding the adequacy of the power supply.

With the new power supply, the PC booted up fine. However, within about a 1/2 hour of browsing, the PC locked / froze up with a grey / white screen on the LCD monitor (-- no error messages). This is the same condition I had earlier with the borrowed 200w power supply.
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Next I tried to rule out the operating system (WinXP) and the IDE harddrive that the OS was located on. Perhaps, there was a glitch somewhere in the OS or harddrive.

I booted the system from a Ubuntu (linux) v8.10 live CD. The system loaded, and worked fine (-- I could browse the internet as well as access files across my network). After checking functionality and access, I left the system on, idling. When I came back a 1/2 to hour later, the PC was again locked / frozen with a grey / white screen.

I think this pretty conclusively rules out an OS or harddrive error.
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Ok, so what am I left with? -- the motherboard, cpu, and memory. Unfortunately, I don't have other compatible motherboard, cpu, and memory that I can swap out.
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Since I consistently get the same error (-- the grey/white blank screen and frozen PC--), I'm wondering whether this might be an onboard video problem. So, I think my next test will be to disable the onboard video and install a PCI video card that I already have. Perhaps, that may isolate the problem.
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I'll report back when I have more to share.

How did your testing go? Did you locate the source of the problem?

I built a speaker from an old set of portable headphones and got zero beeps. (I know the headphone/speaker was working - tested.) So, I RMA'd the motherboard again. I got it back last week, before I went on vacation. I will try to find the time this week to try to set it up again. I will let you know how it goes. Thanks for asking.