Err...why is it that I can't use my PSU with my PCIe mobo?

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finalgt

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 3, 2002
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I bought an Antec TruControl 550 watt power supply for $150 about 18 months ago. It was the first time I'd paid more than $40 for a PSU, but I figured, why not invest in a nice power supply; they'll last for years longer than a cheapo Foxtron or whatever.

Unless, of course, the industry arbitrarily fucking changes the ATX power connector to have 24 pins instead of 20, to suit a purpose which I fail to comprehend. In 24 hours, the value of my PSU apparently went from $100 to $0, because I can't use it because I'm missing four pins.

Somebody please tell me there's a way around this. I'm about to have an aneurysm.
 
The fact that you can convert the 20 pin connection into 24 pins without any loss in functionality reiterates for me one of the industry's apparent main points of profitability: when you can't innovate, proliferate. :rolleyes:

Off to Microcenter, I guess.
 
no real need to get a new psu-- if you have a antec 550TC--just get one of those $8 20 to 24 pin adaptors and you should be fine . i even used one with a 450w antec sl--and it seems to have no ill effects and its been running overclocked for months now-- :eek: :cool:

anytime i do an new build i get the 2.0atx where required .

but i would rather have the 550TC with an adaptor than a generic unit with 2.0/24pin--lol anyday.
 
Okay, now the diagnostic LEDs are giving me 3 red LEDs. Not that the documentation explains what this means, but a quick Google says that this means the board is having trouble detecting my RAM. Is somebody going to tell me Corsair XMS is "incompatible" with an Ultra-D now?

Another thing the board does is beep for one second every 3 seconds that it's on. Hmm.
 
e-bay that turkey and get a quality MB-- like the ECS a-939--LOL

all kidding aside--the ultra d's are known to have a power-regulation problem on some MB's.

i'm useing a 450sl antec on mine and haven't had any problems--with an adaptor no less--however i've seen these mb's that couldn't get stable with a 600w seasonic 2.0 ? sometimes a ultra d will get-"-weireded out"--even with the recommended psu and ram from the streets gold-plated list.

one of the culprits to this problem was low v-dim actual / or the v-dimm bouncing up and down.check for overheated mosfits.

try upping the v-dimm and see if that fixes the problem .
 
I can't up the vdimm if I can't get into the BIOS to change it. Nothing happens when the computer turns on, it just beeps. I found this picture though:

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/mechBgon/DFI_SLI_POWER_FITTINGS.gif

I found the connector that plugs into number 1, but it doesn't fix the beeping error. When the fuck did shopping for computer parts become like shopping for diamonds?

Okay. New problem. I removed the RAM and tried all sorts of configurations, and no matter what, the system refuses to boot with both sticks plugged in. However, if I plug only one stick into the first slot, it will get past the RAM. Okay, great, wonderful. Now it's freezing on the last LED; the one that detects the VGA adapter. See, the thing is, I see the video card BIOS screen, and I can even see the screen that says "DFI LanParty" on it. I sit there staring at this image being sent to the monitor from the motherboard, while the motherboard says to me, 'Sorry dude, I don't know where your video card is.' What the fucking hell? I've tried both PCI slots, but it still won't get past that step. Is there any way I can force it? Clearly, a video signal is being sent to my monitor regardless of whether my motherboard thinks it is or not.
 
DFI's are a bitch to get going.

1 stick of ram in the top orange slot.

Move the the jumper that loads the fail safe defaults.

Clear the cmos jumper.

Make sure that all power leads are filled on the board, the 24 pin (either with an adapter or just the 20 pins on your current psu), 4 pin 12v. 4 pin molex, and floppy.

If you can see the boot screen hit delete, i belive the final orange LED doesnt go out till a complete POST (gonna reboot to check).

Probley stuff you've heard and tried but i'm throwing it out there cause i know how much it can suck when stuff doesnt work.
 
i might try a single sided dimm in one of the orange slots to get it to boot past the splash screen. :eek:
 
Actually, I hadn't heard some of that stuff. Thanks.

Still having problems though. As the system is booting up, when it gets to the second LED, the CPU fan all of a sudden starts spinning much slower...then, when it hits the first LED, it hangs there. I hear the POST beep, and the lights on my keyboard come on. However, typing stuff into my keyboard doesn't actually do anything. I've made sure that all of the power connectors (of which there is a ridiculous amount, I should add) are hooked up, but it still doesn't boot. I've tried booting with the fail safe defaults, does the same thing. I've tried putting the jumper on fail safe defaults and then clearing the CMOS and then booting, and it still doesn't work.

Why did so many people recommend this board? Because the alchemists who can actually get it working get slightly higher overclocks than people with boards that were actually made to be used by normal people? I feel like logic is not dictating what does and does not work in this thing...
 
Don't worry about the CPU fan, my first problem was the CPU would spin, then stop, i'd panic and turn it off quickly. The software on the board controls the fan speed, and by default it doesnt even kick it on till 30 degree's. (or do what i did and hard wire it to the psu using an adapter.)

USB or PS2 keyboard?

Also, do hit www.dfi-street.com , make thread and even maybe PM user Angry Games (DFI tech support guy). There gonna be a lot more specialized, but do post any progress here, like to see ya get it working.
 
Bahaha, fixed. After reading the amount of stuff they had on that site about how picky the motherboard is with jumper settings on drives and whatnot, I checked my hard drives and optical drives to make sure they were properly configured. Turns out I had unplugged the optical drives in order to route the power cable down to the fourth power connector in the center of the motherboard; replugging them fixed the problem.

My system now fails to reboot every single fucking time, but whatever man. I keep it on for 4 weeks at a time anyway.
 
finalgt said:
The fact that you can convert the 20 pin connection into 24 pins without any loss in functionality reiterates for me one of the industry's apparent main points of profitability: when you can't innovate, proliferate. :rolleyes:

Off to Microcenter, I guess.
Click to expand...

Actually, when you're splitting the power source to power others, it's not a good thing. You won't get as much voltage going through.
 
Fixed. Changed Drive Mode from "CHS" to "Auto" and it worked.

If I had to personify this motherboard, I would say it would be the type of guy who reads comics and sci-fi books all day and really generally knows a whole lot about a whole lot of stuff, but who has absolutely zero social skills and acts like a total dick.
 
I don't think it's a good idea to post that you're using a 20-24pin ATX adapter in the DFI-Street forums. :p
 
but i think you got a bad mb--my referbed ultra runs with a 20-24 pin on a 450sl antec--has no stability or boot issues at all and has no problems with most brands of ram.

however i've seem them that couldn't run right with all the dfi-street approved stuff--these MB's can suffer from power regulation problems --that is the usual reason why they won't work with psu's that work on everyother nf4mb. a 600w seasonic 2.0 should have way more that required--but is still a no-go on some of theses DFI's?--that don't sound "right" at all.

the affected mb could be as high as 20%

i really don't know how DFI got by this without a re-call.

so if all DFI-nf4 mb require all this special stuff--why do most of them run fine--with the same psu's /ram ectra that other nf4s use ?

i would think that the adaptor might cost you 1 amp--since you got plenty with the 550tc you should have more than enough.

by the way --what are your volts reading ??
 
I have built quite a few DFI NF4 mobos and I know you can run them with 20 pin PSUs and you can run SLI without the AUX video power connect plugged in.( I know the Ultra is not the SLI version but both board PCBs are the same and the boards behave very much the same.)

BUT if you do the things above they very likely will have stange problems. (Even though people will post "I am not having any issues" it does not mean that everyone will not or even that most will not have problems.)The difference between ATX and ATX 2.0 is not just 20 pins Vs 24 Pins. It has to do with power output to specific rails. The additional pins are mainly designed to feed additional power to the 16X PCI-E slot. In my experience ALL NF4 mobos are power sensitive and RAM sensitive. The DFI seems to be less forgiving than the Asus and the Abit AN8 series seem to be the least forgiving if you stray from recommend configurations.

With all that being said the DFI is an Amazing board. Once you get your problems figured out it will run like a champ....until you change something...then you start over.

(BTW I really don't think you have a board issue.)
 
All my issues are fixed except for the notable fact that I can't ever use both of my sticks of RAM. I flashed to the 6/23 BIOS like everybody told me to. I put the RAM sticks in slots 2 and 4 like everybody told me to. I upped the RAM voltage a bit just in case, like everybody told me to. I even tried slots 1 and 3 just in case, and slots 1 and 2, and slots 3 and 4, and slots 1 and 4. No matter what the fuck I do, the system won't recognize both my RAM sticks at the same time.

I even put one stick in slot 1, then overclocked the living hell out of it (it's a Corsair PC3200 CAS2 module, and I ran it at DDR466 2-2-3-2) and ran Memtest86...both sticks passed the test after 30 minutes at those speeds, seperately.

But why the fuck won't they both work together?
 
yea that is a bit weird.

i've seen them do lots of weird stuff but that is kinda new .


one thing it ain't the psu and it ain't the 20 to 24 pin adaptor doing that--

i'm still thinking its the MB , have you any other ram to try in it?

:cool:
 
finalgt said:
All my issues are fixed except for the notable fact that I can't ever use both of my sticks of RAM. I flashed to the 6/23 BIOS like everybody told me to. I put the RAM sticks in slots 2 and 4 like everybody told me to. I upped the RAM voltage a bit just in case, like everybody told me to. I even tried slots 1 and 3 just in case, and slots 1 and 2, and slots 3 and 4, and slots 1 and 4. No matter what the fuck I do, the system won't recognize both my RAM sticks at the same time.

I even put one stick in slot 1, then overclocked the living hell out of it (it's a Corsair PC3200 CAS2 module, and I ran it at DDR466 2-2-3-2) and ran Memtest86...both sticks passed the test after 30 minutes at those speeds, seperately.

But why the fuck won't they both work together?
Click to expand...

It still could be a PSU issue. (two sticks draw more power than one.) Also I have seen once were I had a bad CPU do the exact same thing you are having. I ran fine in single channel. As soon as I added the 2nd module it would fail memtest. (And the system would fail to take an OS) We could not believe it was the cpu as it ran fine in single channel with either stick of ram. We replaced the mobo and both mem modules. Same issue. We replaced the cpu.....problem solved. I was very strange but I guess made sense as the memory controller is in the cpu.

Guess this is the hard part of build it yourself. When you have a problem then you don't have tons of spare parts to test with. If you have a friend with a similar setup I would see if he would let you swap out different parts individually until you find the source of the problem.
 
as u probably have read, the dfi is picky about ram. dfi support(hence dfi street) officially will not support you unless you have a "true" 24 pin psu. so do what i did when i had the early ocz 520 powerstream with 20 pin connector. lie. or try xtremesystems.org, the xtreme bandwidth forum. they will probably have exact settings for your ram. i didnt notice what ram you had but the dfi usually has probs wirh ballistix, and corsair. also some stuff about vx sticks getting killed in the number 3 slot. good luck.

very truly yours,
politenessman
 
Thanks. Yeah, it's Corsair.

P.S. Why is it that my PSU could run the two sticks of RAM plus a 6800GT plus two more hard drives 24/7 for 6 months with no problem, but all of a sudden the DFI makes it pull more power than it can handle?
 
Its not how much power the ram draws, its where the DFI draws it from. With a 4v option the voltage isn't coming from a normal source like your old board or even on pci-e other boards, its coming straight from the 4 pins that was added in the ATX 2.0 spec.
 
just as an FYI: DFI wont support you if youre using a 20pin unit on an NF4 board, they said it can kill memory or something

just something to consider... i saw it on their boards ( an admin posted it) but i dont have a link
 
I think the Ultra-D is the most stable with a 24 pin PSU (no just with an adapter, actually 24 pin, but I would try a 20 to 24 pin adapter, I'm pretty sure that xoxide has some, and some other places.
 
When somebody can clarify for me exactly why arbitrarily adding 4 pins to the 12v connector can make a board "more stable" or less likely to kill RAM, I might possibly consider buying another PSU. Until then, fuck that.
 
Why did so many people recommend this board? Because the alchemists who can actually get it working get slightly higher overclocks than people with boards that were actually made to be used by normal people? I feel like logic is not dictating what does and does not work in this thing...
Click to expand...

You sir, just won a spot in my sig. I couldn't have said that better.
 
finalgt said:
When somebody can clarify for me exactly why arbitrarily adding 4 pins to the 12v connector can make a board "more stable" or less likely to kill RAM, I might possibly consider buying another PSU. Until then, fuck that.
Click to expand...

Wondering why the board requires a 24pin PSU....it is not the number of pins but the insides of the PSU. The new ATX 2.0 spec is different than the old ATX spec and requires the PSU to have more dedicated power rails that have higher amps. As I posted above the additional 4 pins on the PSU allow for more amps to be drawn by the motherboard. (Again as stated above the main reason was to allow for more power to be drawn from the PCI-E slot which has a higher power rating than AGP does.) With this being said DFI designed the motherboard to draw more power so it can overclock better. Think about it......it is the ONLY NF4 board to consistantly OC over 300 FSB. So asking why is like asking why the HSF on a 650 MHz Athlon (which kept it cool for 3 years) will not cool your new Athlon 64 3500+. The new spec requires new hardware.

If you do not want to run a 24 Pin PSU. I recommend RMAing the motherboard and buying a board that does not require one. Abit makes the AX8 which uses a 20 Pin PSU and will run your A64 and a PCI-E videocard. It is fast and stable but OCs poorly. It also got a good review on this website and is cheap.

The moral of the story is you can't run a Top Fuel dragster on pump gas....even if your Honda runs fine on it.

If DFI says you have to run a 24Pin PSU than you do because the motherboard was designed for it. I am building systems right now with the DFI LP NF4 boards. ALL the DFI NF4 systems we build use 24 Pin PSUs and I have never had one issue with them. Also we have been using Corsair XL Pro memory on these systems so I know it works as well.

Good luck and I hope you get it figured out.
 
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