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Tech Help - PC Won't Booth with New Graphics Card
I have a manufacturer-built Gateway PC that I've never made any modifications to, but I recently decided to purchase a new graphics card from it. I'm switching from a Radeon 5770 to a GeForce 560 TI. I uninstalled my AMD drivers, rebooted, shutdown, and swapped cards. When I went to boot the PC back up, however, it just made several high pitched beeping sounds. I didn't count how many, I gave it a solid minute and it continued beeping. Any idea what the problem may be?
Note #1: I had the power supply connected using the same cable that was in there for my previous card. One difference I noticed was that my previous card had 1 six-pin connector, while the 560 has 2 six-pin connectors. I didn't try swapping to the other one, as I really didn't want to mess with anything before consulting people who know more than I.
Note #2: With my 5770, I always hear a surge on my initial startup. The fan kicks in high gear for a second or 2 and lets me know everything's on. When I tried to boot with the 560, it was decidedly silent.
My guess and concern is that maybe my power supply isn't giving the card enough juice to boot up? It looks like this is my PS. The card recommends 500 watts, which is this power supply's max, but it also requires a 12 volt current rating of 30A. I have no idea what that part means, and don't see any corresponding numbers on my PS.
Thanks for the help.
Comments
usually when a card requires more power to run than you have power it will still boot up fine and work fine until you start playing a game and it will either have lots of artifacts or your system will shut down and restart. You need to find out your motherboard info and find out how many beeps its putting out by restarting it etc. That will give you a good idea of the issue.
Also rule out problems from the start by putting back in your old card or just take out your new card and see if it boots. If it boots fine than you kinda know the issue already. If it still doesnt boot do a checklist and check all your wire connections.
I know i spent 3 damn days after installing a brand new motherboard and processor in a machine because it was booting then restarting and I though maybe it was my power supply and it wasnt it was just crappy ram and worked fine after replacing it. so it can be a number of things.
The problem is you need to be plugging in both six pin adapters. Not just one of them. The 560 will use both six pins. The extra one there is not just for looks but is required.
If your PSU doesnt have two six pin outs then you will indeed need a new PSU.
1) Make sure you're using the correct OS bit-related version of the driver, especially for a NVidia driver. If you have a 32-bit system and are accidentally trying to install a 64-bit driver, you'll get that issue, and vice versa.
2) Power supply is a HUGE deal. If your PSU is terribly inadequate, that could be another issue, especially if it has two ports and your previous one only used one.
http://www.fsp-group.com.tw/report/FSP450-60EP.pdf
It's 80 PLUS Bronze certified, so it's probably not the worst sort of junk.
But it's also a 450 W power supply, not 500 W. Power supplies that feel the need to try to have one nominal wattage while trying to give the impression that they actually have a different, higher wattage rating tend to be mediocre at best.
If you're trying to get a new video card with a probably dicey power supply and case, then an old, hot Fermi card like you got is exactly what you don't want. Can you take it back and get something more sensible? Radeon HD 7000 series cards and GeForce GTX 600 series cards (the non-GTX 600 series cards are either Fermi rebrands or the ridiculous GT 640) offer around 70% more performance in the same power consumption as older Fermi cards.
This is probably the immediate problem. But just getting it to boot up isn't necessarily a good thing if the rest of your rig can't handle a new video card that pulls more than double the wattage of your old one. What case do you have?
I was just pointing out the problem. But as someone that has a 560. It doesnt use 500 watts of power. It's recommended, but under full load it rarely goes above 300-350 watts.
It's a fairly safe bet, unless he has a bunch of pci / pci-e cards installed also, that his machine will run just fine with the card. That's if his PSU has the two six pin connectors (I doubt it).
Oh certainly, your post was good. My post was directed at the original poster.
Of course a GeForce GTX 560 Ti won't pull 500 W. But it might pull 200 W, and that's a lot more than a Radeon HD 5770 will pull.
I got the card I did because a friend of mine got a great deal on it ($109 after a $30 rebate). He grabbed another one for me when I asked him to. It was altogether very hasty. I obviously would have liked to consult about my system's compatibility with the card first. If worse comes to worse, I can probably repackage it and sell it on ebay and actually turn a small profit, as the card still goes for upward of $200.
Money is an issue, so I wouldn't want to pay any more than I did. I also can't afford to just toss in a new power supply on a whim. Before my friend brought up the 560 TI, I had been looking at the radeon 7770 as the logical successor to my 5770. But when I compared the 7770 to the 560, I saw that the 560 out performed the 7770 rather drastically. Price and performance were honestly the only 2 factors in my hasty decision. I hadn't even considered the fact that some cards require notably more power.
If it requires another six-pin connection, i'd need to get another cord. The card came with two very short ones that wouldn't come close to reaching the power supply, which is on the opposite side of the tower. The idea of opening up the power supply shell to plug in more cords, if there even are more ports, is also a little daunting (it looked like a real mess). I definitely didn't want to go in there before consulting anyone first.
As for the case, this is the model for the whole Gateway PC I bought in 2010.
Edit to say thank you for the posts over the night!
The short cords that came with the graphics card are meant to be plugged into a normal MOLEX connector in one of the cords already dangling from the PSU.
But as said, if the PSU does not have two six-pin connectors you should get a new one, as those adapters that came with the card are usually trouble. The PSU is not designed to run on so many high-power connectors on the few rails it has and will be in danger of burning out.
Ah, so you would never manually connect a cord directly to the power supply? The cords that are already hanging out account for all of the available ports? (Talk about being glad I wait to ask people who know what they're doing before experimenting myself.)
Don't open up the power supply and tinker inside of it unless you know a lot more than you're letting on--and more than I know, for that matter. Rather, there should be a second 6-pin PCI-E connector built into the power supply that can be plugged into the card.
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If you regard rebates as "free", then a GeForce GTX 560 Ti at $110 after rebate is certainly a good deal if you've already got the case and power supply to handle it. But it's not such a good deal if it means you have to then spend $50 for a new case and $60 for a new power supply.
The power supply would be dicey for that video card, but is likely to be adequate. If it's not adequate, though, it could mean anything from weird glitches that are a pain to track down (e.g., why does my computer blue screen on this particular game?) to fried hardware. And if it ends in dead hardware, a dead power supply is the least of your worries, as they sometimes take a lot of other hardware with them when they die.
The case, on the other hand, is a problem. I really hope that you got an external exhaust video card, as an internal exhaust video card would mean you have a single case fan trying to handle for a system that could put out as much as 300 W. That means the inside of your case will get very hot, and that's a problem waiting to happen. That would also be bad news for the power supply, as many power supplies perform markedly worse if they get hot, and blowing hot air into a power supply really isn't the most effective way to keep it cool.
So really, unless it's an external exhaust card (give me a picture of the card and I can tell you), you need a new case. Or if you can't do that, then you need to take some extreme measures like taking the side off of the case, having some external fan pointed at it, not putting the case where anything could accidentally fall into it, and being very vigilant about cleaning out the dust that will inevitably accumulate as a result of having an open side of the case.
Other than that, the video card will be fine, except for when you play games on it.
I'm at work right now, so I can't take a picture myself. I'm fairly certain this is the exact model, however. On the surface that points outside the case, it has the 2 DVI ports and 1 mini HDMI port on one strip, and what looks to be a vent along the entire 2nd strip. Is that vent what would be considered external exhaust?
The only reason I wanted a card upgrade was for games, obviously. So if this would cause more problems than it would solve in that domain, I would certainly abort.
Would any other info on other parts help determine how much power is being consumed and how much wiggle room I have for this card? Is there a program I can use to determine how much power I'm using and which sources are using it? Or is all that info just in the BIOS?
I wouldn't be surprised if my MOBO is as generic as my power supply, as it's not a custom built PC. I know gateway has manufacturer restrictions on many of the BIOS features. I can't overclock my processor, for example (It's an I7 860, clocked by the manufacturer at 2.88ghz), which I've been fine with since I haven't experienced any processor bottlenecking. All of my gaming limitations seem to come from the GPU at the moment.
If the PC is beeping it a bad card send it back and get another.
That's an internal exhaust card. The fan and heatsink are in the middle of the card, and air coming off of the heatsink will blow in every which direction. Some of that hot air will go out the back of the card, and thus straight out of the case, but most of it won't.
An external exhaust card would be something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133470
That has a fan in the front, a heatsink in the middle (which you can't see), and a vent in the back of the card. The rest of the card is mostly sealed, so air has to go in the front of the card (pulled in by the fan), across the heatsink where it picks up heat, and then out the back of the card, which takes it right out of the case. Most of the heat released by the video card will thus be sent out of the case rather than sprayed off into the case.
An external exhaust card like that lets a case dissipate more heat than it would otherwise be able to, because the case airflow isn't responsible for most of the heat from the video card. An internal exhaust card is better for getting heat off of the video card, because you can have multiple fans sending air every which way rather than more limited airflow because it all has to go one way. An internal exhaust card is typically better if you've got a case with plenty of fans and airflow, which is why most channel cards are internal exhaust. But you don't have a case with plenty of airflow.
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Measuring power consumption directly takes some fancy equipment that you almost certainly don't have. But that's the wrong approach to take, anyway. The problem is that power consumption varies wildly. One game might push your hardware a lot harder than another. Changing graphical settings can greatly influence your system power consumption in a particular game. Even at fixed settings in a particular game, different areas in the game can have very different loads on your hardware. Other hardware in your system can greatly affect how much heat your video card puts out, too; for example, if the card spends half its time waiting for the processor, it will do a lot less work than if you have a fast enough processor for the video card to go all out all the time.
The right way to handle the situation is to make sure your system can handle the greatest power draw (which is the same thing as heat output, by conservation of energy) that it could plausibly take. You don't want to check several games, see that they're fine, stop checking, and then have some other future game make your system overheat.
Some people will see that happen and blame it on the game, saying that several other games work fine. But they're wrong, and don't realize that it's likely not realizing that in some games that seem to work fine, the hardware is getting pretty close to hot enough to cause problems.
I say we shouldn't be quick to praise badly-coded games that are unable to properly exploit the hardware you've got. A good game engine should be able to push something to near 100% load (which is not the same as max power consumption, as some instructions put more load on hardware than others) to maximize frame rates, unless the player decides to throttle it back, such as by capping a frame rate at 60. A sloppy game engine could make it so that during part of every frame, the video card is essentially idle while waiting on the processor, and in other parts of every frame, the processor is nearly idle while waiting on the video card. That will reduce the load on hardware, but it comes at the expense if getting frame rates considerably lower on given hardware than would otherwise be possible.
I know it was posted before. But you can get an adapter for the second six pin. An adapter that will take 2 four pin plugs and turn it into a six pin. They run like $2-$5 at most places and it just takes plugging in both of the 4 pins into the adapter and it changes it into a 6 pin. That would give you 2 six pin plugs you could use.
One thing to note:
That beeping is a code.
The number and spacing of the beeps tells you exactly what the problem is.
Beep codes
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a video error.
Some cards don't spin the fans up to 100% on power up. So that may or may not be a problem with your new card. ~Most~ of the time cards will work without the auxiliary power cables installed, but not always. You do need both connectors installed on your new video card.
So it could be inadequate power, however, if your power supply was just severely overloaded, it would shut off (and probably fry something in your computer in the process). It could also be a DOA video card.
I would RMA the video card (it legitimately doesn't work, for whatever reason, so it's eligible), and while waiting on that, upgrade the power supply - so that when the RMA'ed new card gets in, you have a beefier power supply to try it with, and you won't have to keep guessing as to if the video card may or may not have been dead to begin with (and possibly have extended this issue out to past the point where you could RMA it).
*bump to re-ask my previous question* What's a good, economical power supply and case that i can purchase in the near future?
Also, update: I plugged both 6-pin cords in, and it's up and running. I haven't done anything remotely stressful yet. One last question: can I temporarily "underclock" the card so it won't draw as much power as usual until I get a better power supply, just to be safer?
It would be more effective to just put your old card back in. Radeon HD 5000 series cards had better energy efficiency than GeForce 500 series cards.
As for which power supply and case to get, that depends on the prices on the day you buy it. Do you have the money to buy a new case and power supply right now?
If its working when you plug in both 6 pin connectors then it sounds like you have solved the problem. While I may get a new psu the one you have seems to be working. The problem was not having it installed properly.
To answer your question here is a power supply.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139028 = $69.99 before $20 rebate = $49.99 after rebate.
That should be a decent enough power supply for the money.
if you want to spend a little more for a better one while not breaking the bank then.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182071 = $89
A cheaper case that will provide better cooling.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147170 = $55 before $15 in rebates, $40 after. Has 4 fans, usb 3.0, and room to add 3 more fans if you so desire.
If you include mail in rebates with the cost you can get both a power supply and this case for around $100 bucks.
edit: as Quiz has said tho, prices change alot depending on the day. You may be better off asking when you are actually ready to buy