P4 power alternatives?

tejesh83 · 06-23-2003, 06:26 PM

I have P4 2.4Ghz. Unfortunately, I think the Opus 150W PS is a little under powered for the CPU. My system reboots during boot up anywhere from 0-10 times before finally loading the winxp desktop. At first, I thought it was heat or a video card problem, but the problem occurs even on cool nights using the onboard video.

My motherboard doesn't require the P4 connector. I've used it indoors with my 400W supply without the connector with no problems. It seemed to work with the Opus for the first few days as well. But now it just keeps rebooting during boot up. Once booted, it works fine. I have yet to have it crash while driving around and playing mp3s. Its just getting it booted thats the problem. Maybe the boot process is a little more demanding then playing mp3s to winamp and the cpu needs a little more power than the Opus can provide.

The P4 motherboad connector is unused at the moment, so I would like to take advantage of this. How can/should I hook in some more 12v rail power.

The battery has plenty of around 12V ampage. You think I could wire it straight into the P4 connector? I could also use the igition feed I use to signal the Opus (comes from a nearby socket). Will the unregulated power be the death of my MB or Cpu?

Thanks for any help or insight.

cproaudio · 06-24-2003, 01:01 AM

What are you using the P4 for? finding aliens or encoding 10 DivX movies at a time? You dont need a 2.4ghz for playing MP3s. a P3 Tualatin 1.2ghz would be fast enough to play DVD, DivX, MP3 or anything you throw at it. Just dont encode DivX movies. It'll take you all night. Besides, it uses half the power of the P4 2.4Ghz chip.

tejesh83 · 06-24-2003, 08:37 AM

Auto navigation. Using a bunch of sensors and some servos, I have it setup to steer my car keeping it in the lane and control the speed so it doesnt run into anything while scanning cop frequencies to avoid tickets. Not really, but maybe in the future.

I played around with it some more yesterday. I took a free connector from the PS and wired the 12v pins to the aux connector. It booted on the first try. Just to be sure, I unhooked the cable and reboot. Again, it became unstable and refused to boot. Although, the Opus doesn't put out enough 12v amps, maybe the cable will be enough to stabalize it. I'm picking up a connector/adapter for it shortly and will post results.

But my question still stands, anyone know the best way to power the 12v aux connector via a dc-dc device?

I would probably need about 6amps of clean 12V power. Any ready-made solutions available? From my research on google, I found that most regulator chips need a slightly higher input that output voltage. So for clean 12V, they need an input voltage of at least 13.5 but can range upto 48v. But in a car, the voltage can range from under to over 12V depending on load. I wonder how Opus tackles this? Maybe invert the power to a higher voltage before applying a regulator. Unfortunately, the only electrical engineering course I took was an introduction level and we focused on computer architecture. I may ask some EE majors at school for help.

saletel · 06-24-2003, 11:47 AM

i have keypower 250 watt atx dc-dc power supply that i'm looking to trade for an opus. let me know

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