ari
09-30-05, 03:45 PM
So I was playing a rousing game of Bridge-IT (http://www.chroniclogic.com) on Wednesday on my 6600GT when all of a sudden the machine turned off. I pushed the power button and smelled smoke. Having just swapped out my CPU to a dual-core Athlon 4200+, I thought I had fried the chip. No such luck (I still have the old CPU as a spare). Instead, I touched the back of the vid card -- youch! When I looked at the front of the card (see pictures linked below), it looks like some sort of power regulation chip quite literally blew up.
Anyways, here's a pic from my power strip's log.
http://www.thirdnut.com/graph.png
Circled is the time the PC died. You can see the serious spike as the card ate it. The orange line is real power in Watts and the brownish-maroon is apparent power in Volt-Amps (basically Watts without the power-factor correction). I should note that this power strip is running my desktop, LCD screen and a set of Z-680s, as well as some other smaller things (cell phone chargers, etc...). The monitor takes ~35W and the speakers take another 40, so the pc was probably drawing ~300-350W when it died and (you can't see it in this graph, it's too long term) about 200W immediately before.
Pics of the card are available at my website (www.thirdnut.com/gallery/v/VidCard) (http://www.thirdnut.com/gallery/v/VidCard)
It's on its way to MSI for some warranty work, but I thought you guys might like to see it. :)
Oh, as you can see, the power numbers went back up... I replaced the card temporarily with a Radeon X300SE... cheapest PCI-E card they had at Circuit City and everything else seems to be working. It's a beast... ugh.
Anyways, here's a pic from my power strip's log.
http://www.thirdnut.com/graph.png
Circled is the time the PC died. You can see the serious spike as the card ate it. The orange line is real power in Watts and the brownish-maroon is apparent power in Volt-Amps (basically Watts without the power-factor correction). I should note that this power strip is running my desktop, LCD screen and a set of Z-680s, as well as some other smaller things (cell phone chargers, etc...). The monitor takes ~35W and the speakers take another 40, so the pc was probably drawing ~300-350W when it died and (you can't see it in this graph, it's too long term) about 200W immediately before.
Pics of the card are available at my website (www.thirdnut.com/gallery/v/VidCard) (http://www.thirdnut.com/gallery/v/VidCard)
It's on its way to MSI for some warranty work, but I thought you guys might like to see it. :)
Oh, as you can see, the power numbers went back up... I replaced the card temporarily with a Radeon X300SE... cheapest PCI-E card they had at Circuit City and everything else seems to be working. It's a beast... ugh.