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PC Power Supply Improvement The Problem I was having some reliability problems with my main PC. It would self-reset, crash or just lock-up ten or more times each day. I was seriously looking at blaming MS and getting a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. I had a Diamond Stealth 3000 3D card that had never worked reliably. Whenever I swapped the cheap 1 meg card for the Diamond card, the PC became unusable due to crashes. I had heard that the Diamond drivers were at fault. I now believe that the additional load of the bigger card on the power supply, increased the ripple on the power supply to a point that the motherboard/CPU could not tolerate. The Solution I realised that I had been upgrading the same case & power supply for the last 6 years. The computer runs continuously. The oscilloscope indicated that there was 200mV of noise & ripple on the 5V rail coming from the power supply. I compared this with another PC which revealed only 5mV. The solution was to modify the power supply, removing the final 1000uF capacitor and putting in a new 4700uF cap. Problem solved. The Diamond video card is now installed and working great. I wonder how many PC's have been ditched or other hardware blamed because of a dried up or inadequate 50 cent capacitor? Please let me know if you're having similar problems If you have any questions or comments, send me an email. |
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