Wrestlevania Posted March 5, 2009 As you may (not) already know, I recently bagged myself a virtually brand new Gainward 'Bliss' 7800GS off eBay for the princely sum of £2.75 (about $4.50 US). The seller was a computer hardware "returns" (faults, ex-warranty, etc.) company and sold me just the card alone; no driver CD, no cables, nothing - just the PCB effectively. On the back of the card, there's a 6-pin external power port which needs to be connected to my PC's PSU. However, this port seems to be a male plug and not a socket. Furthermore, as I didn't get any of the accessories with the card I don't know what cable I need to hook this up. The card's running fine (after a necessary registry hack to the Nvidia drivers), but I'm fairly sure it's only running at about 25-40% optimum at the moment. Does anyone know what cable I need to get? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
James Posted March 5, 2009 I'm no expert at all this stuff, but I can tell you that my PSU came with a bunch of PCI-E power cables, each with eight pins, two of which were separated. Unless your PSU is modular, I would have thought you'd need a new one. But if it runs without, I guess not. Have you tried anything properly taxing yet? As I mentioned in GTA, my PC is kind of buggered at the moment, and the graphics card is affected, and I suspect it's something to do with the power, so I probably shouldn't even be posting in here. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 5, 2009 My PSU has a very similar-looking plug on it to the plug on the back of the Gainward card, but you can't go male-to-male in PC hardware land. I was thinking of stripping the PSU's plug off and then carefully connecting each cable to the right pin on the graphics card's power port -- but I've no idea which pin to connect each wire to. And the 'Bliss' is an AGP card btw, in the interests of absolute pedantry. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 5, 2009 Managed to find a reasonable photo of the power socket on the back of the Gainward 'Bliss' 7600GS card online: Is this a typical PCI-E power connector? Seeing as it's not a PCI-E card, I've no idea if this is a fair assumption or not. Also: is there such a thing as an IDE-to-PCI-E power socket adaptor? Would mean I don't have to buy a new PSU then, and I think my current one has plenty of spare power (and amperage) on it anyway. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
elmuerte Posted March 5, 2009 it has not much to do with the PCI-X or AGP bus. It's just that the card needs more power than the slot will deliver. There were even PCI cards that required additional power. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderPeel2001 Posted March 5, 2009 Yipe. You should be careful with that, if it needs a lot of power and attempts to draw it through your mobo instead of directly from your PSU, it might blow your mobo :/ Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 5, 2009 Yipe. You should be careful with that, if it needs a lot of power and attempts to draw it through your mobo instead of directly from your PSU, it might blow your mobo :/ My understanding is that that's a physical impossibility. The reason it needs a separate power coupling (i.e. on the back of the card) is because an AGP slot's power is too restrictive. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderPeel2001 Posted March 5, 2009 Well you obviously seem to be doing ok so far... That does indeed look like a PCI-E power connector. You can get an adaptor to turn two of your standard molex's into a single PCI-E, I believe. Edit: Here you go (although you should check that your PSU can handle it, I guess). Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 5, 2009 Excellent! Thanks very much for the link -- ordering one now. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
kayanat Posted March 12, 2009 I don't wanna modify my PC hardwere. Is there an adapter to convert the digital signal of the PC to the analoge signal of my CRT TV.That would take out the bluur so i can type and surf the web.If there isnt an adapter for my application, can u tell me how i can without modifying the PC hardware? If there is an adapter, can u tell me what its called and details about it? Possibly a web link? Thanks a billion! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 12, 2009 Excellent! Thanks very much for the link -- ordering one now. Meant to update this thread sooner to say it arrived on Tuesday and so I fitted it that evening. The plug was slightly different to the socket on my particularly card -- centre-bottom pin was squared instead of having rounded shoulders. Decided to just jam it on anyway and power it up, with my hand gingerly on the power cord in case anything started to smell funny. Luckily, all seems fine. Can't say there's been a huge leap in raw frame rate alone, but I can now turn on much more advanced Shaders and other features without any noticable impact on performance. Left 4 Dead looks even better than it did on my 360! Thanks again for the tip-off, ThunderPeel. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Thrik Posted March 12, 2009 Good to hear. Speaking of hand on the power cord, I absolutely shit myself the other day after doing a bit of hard drive replacement. I was happily browsing the web when 10 minutes later I heard the most horrible sound you could possibly imagine coming from a PC: an extremely loud grinding noise, almost like dragging plastic along concrete. Went into panic mode, immediately cut the power, and found that one of the PSU cables had found its way into my GeForce 8800GTX's fan. :tdown: :tdown: Fortunately no permanent damage was caused, and the fan still seems to be operating properly. But shit. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 12, 2009 Shit, that's horrible. Good ol' PC gaming! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Nachimir Posted March 12, 2009 That's happened to me too, right after building a brand new PC. Terrifying. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 12, 2009 That reminds me... I remember a friend once completely replaced the guts of his machine with a new motherboard and everything -- typical base upgrade onto new chipset/socket platform. Only he left one of those brass, six-sided mounting pegs loose under the motherboard when he installed it. Turned it on, ran fine for a short while, then the peg must have slipped and there a bang and a nasty smell of burning. Completely cooked the motherboard, but luckily nothing else needed replacing. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
elmuerte Posted March 12, 2009 Ha.. I've got some of those stories too. Actually, a friend of mine has the same "loose screw" problem once. But he also once broke is mother board in two during a memory upgrade. The new DIMMs he bought were slightly thicker than the previous DIMMs, and didn't fit "well" into the DIMM slot. With a little bit of pressure his DIMM slot and mother board gave up. An other friend once had a CD-Rom explode in his DVD drive. There were pieces everywhere. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderPeel2001 Posted March 12, 2009 Wow, I know there's a limit on how fast they can spin... My old DVD-Rom drive had a "super fast" mode that you could enable, but they warned if there was any damage to the disc, it would most likely shatter at that speed! It's funny the speed of a DVD drive is limited by how fast the disc can spin without breaking, rather than any other technological restraints. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jayel Posted March 12, 2009 whatever happened to those cdrom drives with multiple lenses so that the data can be read fast without spinning the disc at a dangerous rate? I remember reading about them in magazines a long time ago, but I don't ever recall seeing them in stores. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 12, 2009 An other friend once had a CD-Rom explode in his DVD drive. There were pieces everywhere. A different friend of mine had exactly the same happen to him. Problem was, it happened to a rather expensive Panasonic slot drive. So he couldn't really fix it... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Nachimir Posted March 13, 2009 Turned it on, ran fine for a short while, then the peg must have slipped and there a bang and a nasty smell of burning. Completely cooked the motherboard, but luckily nothing else needed replacing. Ouch. They had stacks of old, broken PC hardware at the college where I learned to build them. The best was a motherboard with a rounded chunk missing from one corner, charred on the edge. Apparently a student had put an old style power connector in it the wrong way around and turned it on, resulting in a big bang An other friend once had a CD-Rom explode in his DVD drive. There were pieces everywhere. That's happened to me too, crack a disc in the centre and it will get pulled apart and shatter (Some DVD cases can do this to discs, happened to me once with a copy of UT2004). Luckily, once I'd dismantled the burner and plucked all the bits of CD out, it still worked. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Scrobbs Posted March 13, 2009 Back in my first job, when I was basically building PC's for the company I worked for, they were buying the power supplies with the 240/110v switch on the back. One day, I was bored, and wanted to see how much of a bang I'd get for switching the voltage from 240 -> 110 while it was turned on. I did this with a plastic screwdriver at arms length. There was an almighty bang, and the biggest, blue-est, fattest spark I'd ever seen jumped about 6 inches out of the back of the machine. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Wrestlevania Posted March 13, 2009 Top work, fella. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Nachimir Posted March 13, 2009 (edited) Man this thread is bringing memories back I can't remember if it was a Thumb who told me this one or my old housemate. Basically a guy had bought a 0.8v AGP card for his system, but his board was made for older 1.5v cards, so the notch was on the opposite 3rd of the card to his AGP slot. Solution? Cut off most of the backplate, put the card in upside down and pass the VGA cable through the back of the machine... did not end well. My brother also had someone try to return a desktop system to the shop he was working in, because it had apparently "just stopped working". Turned out he'd kept it on a tiny shelf, teetering high above the floor, and it had fallen off, dragging all the peripherals with it Edited March 13, 2009 by Nachimir Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
elmuerte Posted March 13, 2009 lol... and while he was cuting out part of the back plate he never figured that he might be going something wrong? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
brkl Posted March 13, 2009 I installed some plasticky foamy stuff in my CPU to block noise. It was a sheet of the stuff, designed for that purpose. After a while, I started having problems opening the CPU door. Since nothing was wrong, I just didn't. I'm in Glasgow now, the 'puter is in Finland. My little brother opened the CPU, realizing that the stuff had melted and stuck on to a horizontal metal bar that was next to the door :X Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
