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Not Enough Juice?

liquidfluidity

liquidfluidity

2[H]4U
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Dec 28, 2006
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My son has one of those slimline HP Walmart PCs that he plays WoW on and was getting irritated with the graphics(onboard) He's 12 so he doesn't need much and I picked up a GT240 for almost free. It played fine for a night but now the machine instantly goes to "power savings mode". Is the power supply just too weak to run this card and this is the cause of this? Unfortunately I didn't research the card to see what it's power requirements were. I went to the mfgr site it says a minimum of 300w. Of course the big bad HP only has a 210w psu. Does this sound like the cause of this issue?
 
If it were the PSU it would shutoff when the load reached its peak, And your PSU wont make your computer go into a power saving mode, As the PSU does not output any data to the computer.
 
Hmmmmm.... The card is new but I will try it in another pc. Thought maybe if there wasn't enough juice for the card that maybe it would just "sleep" and not necessarily shut down.
 
A little more Googling is telling me that a insufficiently supplied card will shut down and the onboard will take over - if available. Any agreements or disagreements?
 
Could be a couple things. Check your power settings in windows 7. Make sure its set to performance.
Another is that he might be playing in windowed mode. Some cards will throttle down in windowed mode because it thinks its running a 2d app.
 
That's the problem - I'm not getting anything. The PC boots(audibly) but I'm not getting anything on the screen except for "starting power savings mode" or something like that. I even went into the bios to make sure that PCI-Ex x16 was set. I just tested out the card in my machine and it works fine. Worse comes to worse , I have a spare 550w psu sitting here I can hook up externally just to test. Gonna be a big PIA if I have to move all of this HP crap to a different case just to be able to use a real psu which kills the need factor for the low profile card. Arrggghhhh....!
 
liquidfluidity said:
That's the problem - I'm not getting anything. The PC boots(audibly) but I'm not getting anything on the screen except for "starting power savings mode" or something like that. I even went into the bios to make sure that PCI-Ex x16 was set. I just tested out the card in my machine and it works fine. Worse comes to worse , I have a spare 550w psu sitting here I can hook up externally just to test. Gonna be a big PIA if I have to move all of this HP crap to a different case just to be able to use a real psu which kills the need factor for the low profile card. Arrggghhhh....!
Click to expand...

If it wont boot at all and all you have changed is the video card, its a VERY good chance that 210w isn't enough. Sorry about having to swap it all. Make sure the holes in the motherboard align with the new case and that the front usb/power jumpers aren't in some weird configuration too. Some OEMs design their MBs to not fit in other cases.
 
450 - I already have the card out as i just tried it in my PC.

Let me see if I know where you're going - trying to see if it's enough juice to add to the needs of the card to get it going?

lloose - yeah , I started looking around to see if things are proprietary. I'm hoping I can find one of those old blue/gray HP cases to put things in. Unfortunately , I just threw 3 of them out a couple of months ago.
I can tell the machine is booting - just no video , come to think about it , I think that before it went into power savings , the auto detect came up digital and then went to analog. I'll have to try 450s idea tomorrow. I get up at 3:30 am so this man is on his way to bed! :)


Thanks for the help thus far , guys!
 
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Yeah, it worked back in the P4 days for me. Not sure it'll still apply, but its worth a shot.
 
Update:

Put everything into another case with a bigger psu - all is good. Thanks for the replies , guys!
 
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