Margie’s been fighting a long battle with her ASUS CG5270 computer, which has a reputation for graphic card crashes. It’s been a good system, but an ongoing frustration for her. Most of the complaints have had to do with the Nvidia GeForce GT220 video card. Nvidia keeps releasing new drivers, and people keep complaining about the problem.
I told Margie she could have a new graphics card for Mothers Day (greater love hath no man than that he tricketh out his wife’s gaming rig), but the CG5270 comes with a 400w power supply, which is insufficient to power anything more powerful than the graphics card it comes with. So a new card will require a new power supply.
Plus, some of the forum messages indicate that an insufficient power supply might be responsible for some of thee graphics problems. So in either case, replacing the PSU was a prerequisite for solving the problem.
We went by Best Buy yesterday, and after tracking down the backwater shelf where the PSUs were stored … we had to decide which of the multiple brands of power supplies we wanted to get, and how big (600w? 750w? 1000w?) to get.
Okay, so it has been, of course, many years since I was seriously in the PC Tech Support Case-Cracking Hardware side of things. I’m okay with the basics, but even back in the day, I never replaced a power supply. (Everything in those days was made of clay and wood and used windmills for power, of course.) So I don’t know much about the whole power supply thing, to be honest.
We ended up with a Corsair TX850W PSU, figuring that would be more than enough power for her needs (esp. since the CG5270 doesn’t support dual graphics cards). And, after church today, we shut down her system, and I cracked things open.
Everything actually went pretty well at first. The old PSU came out with no problem (I marked where things had been connected), and the new PSU slid into place, even though an inch or two longer. And it had eleventy dozen cables to hook everything back to, all of them well-bound and and very pretty.
The SATA drives hooked up fine, and the main motherboard connection, and even the lead to the little ASUS light in the front of the case. But there was still one 2×2 socket on the motherboard that the old PSU had connected with … but I didn’t have any 2×2 connectors. Eek!
When in doubt, go to an expert. I IMed Les, and he was able to help me identify the 2×4 connector that broke into two 2×2 pieces, one of which did what it was supposed to do. Huzzah!
I also installed an additional cooling fan (with Margie’s help spotting the power pins on the motherboard), locked up everything again, reconnected all the cables, turned on the power …
AND FLAMES AND BITS OF BROKEN PLASTIC FLEW IN ALL DIREC–
Well, no, it powered up just fine. Which allowed me to sit back and bask in the adulation of my wife for mad PC tech skillz. And now we see if the problems recur. Huzzah!
(Thanks, Les.)
Congrats! I love the feeling you get when you do something that you’re a little unsure about how it will turn out, and it works out really well.
And the machine is still running and seems to be doing quite well, in fact.
I’m always happy to help, Dave. The newer power supplies can be a little tricky to figure out. These days I’m most keen on the modular ones that allow you to plug in only those cables you actually need.
A little more expensive, but solves the whole eleventy-million cable problem.
I was sorely tempted to pick one of those up. They did indeed have them at BB, and the price didn’t strike me as significantly more expensive.
As it was, the cables took more space than the old PSU because (a) there were a lot more of them, and (b) they were sleeved. But there was plenty of space to tuck the extras away inside of the very large case.
Machine still hasn’t blown up. Feeling hopeful.