Poor man's solution - Adding power to your Power Supply!

[stigweed]

Some of you may remember me from previous threads showing the bodging I have done inside my pc with complete disregard for personal safety, usually involving high voltages and electric shocks.

So anyway, I managed to get my FSB on my XP1600 AGOIA-Y upto 163 but only at 1.85V. I found everything was stable until I used somekind of graphical program at which point the thing would either power down with fans running or reset. Probable cause - lack of power.

I was using a cheap ebuyer 400W PSU.

I'm not going to go buy an enermax 550W shiny beast with blue casing, I can't afford it. Especially whne I have a stack of old PSUs here...

Roll on the old 250W AT PSU. Plug all the drives and fans into this. Power up powers the HD ready to boot, starts the cpu fan, chilling the cpu before it gets a chance to toast itself.

Leaving the ATX power connected to the motherboard, I booted. My voltage readings in ASUS probe have gone from -10% to +10% (since there is little draining the ATX PSU) or so, I can do anything involving graphics without the thing dying and I can cool the cpu back down AFTER the machine is switched off (not sure if there's much benefit there.

P.S:

One thing though, with the drives and fans plugged into the AT PSU, every time the HD span up or the DVD did something, you could actually HEAR the fans slow down a tad, then recover. So I put the volcano 7 back onto the ATX. This also ensures that if you forget to power up the second PSU, the fan still starts up in time with the cpu and mobo.

Still increasing the speed gently. Have hit 170FSB giving a total speed of 1.79 GHz. The funny thing is that although I have a higher FSb here, the 1/5 multiplier kicks in around 166MHz so I now actually get a LOWER 3D Mark score. But I will be able to up the cpu much further without stressing the graphics card or the IDE channels.

Anyway, the result:
Now burning in at 1.73GHz
One less psu taking up space in my room.
Much more room to overclock.
About £50-£60 in my pocket.
More 3dMark points and more WUs completed faster.