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GP6-300 Power Supply, Radeon video problem
Sorry this is a long post. I hope someone will be persistent enough t help me out. I have been working on a friend's old Gateway 2000 GP6 (maybe G6? 300MHz PII MMX system. It has a problem where the video "zaps out" frequently. I say tha because the monitor literally makes a zapping sound as the scree contents quickly collapse into a bright white spot and then it goe black. The video card in question is an ATI Radeon 9000 64M AGP card that wa installed by "some guy" a year or so ago because they needed to run tw simultaneous displays (one on the monitor and another on the s-vide output). I have determined that after the problem occurs, the OS (Win98 firs edition) is not locked up. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to blindl shutdown or restart the machine. However, the video will not come bac until the system is powered off/on (restart won't get it back). The problem seems to occur when the system tries to display a lot o white. For example, clicking maximize in a blank Internet Explore window will do it every time. I have also noticed that by starting wit a small IE window and dragging it bigger and bigger, the problem wil occur when the window has almost filled the screen. First I thought this was a software problem (drivers or something), bu now I don't think so. The Radeon manual says the system should have at least a 300-watt powe supply. This system only has 200W. However, my friend insists that they did not always have this problem I'm not so sure. I don't think one would really pay attention t wheteher they were doing things full-screen and/or what the colo content of the screen was. Therefore I theorized that maybe the power supply had weakened ove time and what used to be borderline OK had become a borderline failure Miraculously, I happened to have a brand-new replacement power supply o the exact same model (6500126) which I got stuck with on a prior repai job. I tried the brand-new 200W supply and we still had the sam problem. The peripherals in the machine, besides the Radeon card are 1 ISA mode card, 1 ISA sound card, 1 HDD, 1 floppy, 1 Zip drive, 1 CDRW. Thes components have all been there since before the Radeon card. While I had the new power supply hooked up, I tried disconnecting th Zip drive to see if that would give us the boost we needed but it di not. I cleaned everything out with a can of air so it should be cooling OK All fans appear to be fine and nothing feels hot to the touch. Thi problem occurs even when the system is cold, however it may be a littl worse when it gets hot (this is what first lead me in the direction o power supply). Just for a test, I replaced the hard disk with another and installe Win98SE from scratch (did not load ATI drivers). Even in this defaul state, 640x480 with MS VGA drivers, the problem occurred as soon as maximized Internet Explorer. To me, this test eliminates software fro my possibilities. So what do you all think? Could the power supply cause something like this (especially since th Radeon doc specifically asks for 300W)? I want to believe my frien that "it used to work fine" but I just think most people don't alway pay that much attention. Given the power supply theory, could it be the content of the scree (i.e. mostly white) that pushes it over the edge? I tried different resolutions and that did not help. It occurred to m while typing this that one thing I did NOT try was disabling th secondary display. Do you suppose that the combined content of bot displays trying to do "all white" is what draws more current than w have available? When we ask the video card to run both displays, wil it need more juice? Does it take more power for a video card to display more bright colors or white? Lastly, I would like to try a beefier power supply but I am afraid t hook up a standard ATX replacement. I've been under the impression tha Gateway used a standard ATX connector but the pinouts may be different The physical differences are obvious, but I may be able to do a littl drilling and fabricating to make a standard ATX supply fit physically. It's just the electrical (pinout) part that scares me. I don't want to fry my friend's machine. If you've read this far, THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE! -Marty -- Marty |
#2
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Marty,
First, if the monitor is the one that came with the computer, it sounds like the monitor may be failing. Can you try another monitor? Second, yes, why not use a standard ATX power supply? The motherboard in the GP6-300 is a straight generic off-the-shelf Intel board with 440LX chipset, and the Gateway power supply is a standard one, a little light on the wattage. But I've seen worse: Packard Bell systems and some earlier Gateway systems with 145w power supplies. But first, try another monitor to see what effect the system has under the same conditions. If I had to place a bet on this one, I'd bet on a failing monitor... Ben Myers On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:09:47 +0000, Marty wrote: Sorry this is a long post. I hope someone will be persistent enough to help me out. I have been working on a friend's old Gateway 2000 GP6 (maybe G6?) 300MHz PII MMX system. It has a problem where the video "zaps out" frequently. I say that because the monitor literally makes a zapping sound as the screen contents quickly collapse into a bright white spot and then it goes black. The video card in question is an ATI Radeon 9000 64M AGP card that was installed by "some guy" a year or so ago because they needed to run two simultaneous displays (one on the monitor and another on the s-video output). I have determined that after the problem occurs, the OS (Win98 first edition) is not locked up. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to blindly shutdown or restart the machine. However, the video will not come back until the system is powered off/on (restart won't get it back). The problem seems to occur when the system tries to display a lot of white. For example, clicking maximize in a blank Internet Explorer window will do it every time. I have also noticed that by starting with a small IE window and dragging it bigger and bigger, the problem will occur when the window has almost filled the screen. First I thought this was a software problem (drivers or something), but now I don't think so. The Radeon manual says the system should have at least a 300-watt power supply. This system only has 200W. However, my friend insists that they did not always have this problem. I'm not so sure. I don't think one would really pay attention to wheteher they were doing things full-screen and/or what the color content of the screen was. Therefore I theorized that maybe the power supply had weakened over time and what used to be borderline OK had become a borderline failure. Miraculously, I happened to have a brand-new replacement power supply of the exact same model (6500126) which I got stuck with on a prior repair job. I tried the brand-new 200W supply and we still had the same problem. The peripherals in the machine, besides the Radeon card are 1 ISA modem card, 1 ISA sound card, 1 HDD, 1 floppy, 1 Zip drive, 1 CDRW. These components have all been there since before the Radeon card. While I had the new power supply hooked up, I tried disconnecting the Zip drive to see if that would give us the boost we needed but it did not. I cleaned everything out with a can of air so it should be cooling OK. All fans appear to be fine and nothing feels hot to the touch. This problem occurs even when the system is cold, however it may be a little worse when it gets hot (this is what first lead me in the direction of power supply). Just for a test, I replaced the hard disk with another and installed Win98SE from scratch (did not load ATI drivers). Even in this default state, 640x480 with MS VGA drivers, the problem occurred as soon as I maximized Internet Explorer. To me, this test eliminates software from my possibilities. So what do you all think? Could the power supply cause something like this (especially since the Radeon doc specifically asks for 300W)? I want to believe my friend that "it used to work fine" but I just think most people don't always pay that much attention. Given the power supply theory, could it be the content of the screen (i.e. mostly white) that pushes it over the edge? I tried different resolutions and that did not help. It occurred to me while typing this that one thing I did NOT try was disabling the secondary display. Do you suppose that the combined content of both displays trying to do "all white" is what draws more current than we have available? When we ask the video card to run both displays, will it need more juice? Does it take more power for a video card to display more bright colors, or white? Lastly, I would like to try a beefier power supply but I am afraid to hook up a standard ATX replacement. I've been under the impression that Gateway used a standard ATX connector but the pinouts may be different. The physical differences are obvious, but I may be able to do a little drilling and fabricating to make a standard ATX supply fit physically. It's just the electrical (pinout) part that scares me. I don't want to fry my friend's machine. If you've read this far, THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE! -Marty -- Marty |
#3
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Ben Myers wrote:
Marty, First, if the monitor is the one that came with the computer, it sounds like the monitor may be failing. Can you try another monitor? Second, yes, why not use a standard ATX power supply? The motherboard in the GP6-300 is a straight generic off-the-shelf Intel board with 440LX chipset, and the Gateway power supply is a standard one, a little light on the wattage. But I've seen worse: Packard Bell systems and some earlier Gateway systems with 145w power supplies. But first, try another monitor to see what effect the system has under the same conditions. If I had to place a bet on this one, I'd bet on a failing monitor... Ben Myers Ben has demonstrated his computer accumen. However, my money is on Marty's first suspicion, the power supply. If by some miracle the power supply isn't browning out, I would expect an eventual failure. However, as Ben says, check with a different monitor first before spending any money. Fireclown On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:09:47 +0000, Marty wrote: Sorry this is a long post. I hope someone will be persistent enough to help me out. I have been working on a friend's old Gateway 2000 GP6 (maybe G6?) 300MHz PII MMX system. It has a problem where the video "zaps out" frequently. I say that because the monitor literally makes a zapping sound as the screen contents quickly collapse into a bright white spot and then it goes black. The video card in question is an ATI Radeon 9000 64M AGP card that was installed by "some guy" a year or so ago because they needed to run two simultaneous displays (one on the monitor and another on the s-video output). I have determined that after the problem occurs, the OS (Win98 first edition) is not locked up. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to blindly shutdown or restart the machine. However, the video will not come back until the system is powered off/on (restart won't get it back). The problem seems to occur when the system tries to display a lot of white. For example, clicking maximize in a blank Internet Explorer window will do it every time. I have also noticed that by starting with a small IE window and dragging it bigger and bigger, the problem will occur when the window has almost filled the screen. First I thought this was a software problem (drivers or something), but now I don't think so. The Radeon manual says the system should have at least a 300-watt power supply. This system only has 200W. However, my friend insists that they did not always have this problem. I'm not so sure. I don't think one would really pay attention to wheteher they were doing things full-screen and/or what the color content of the screen was. Therefore I theorized that maybe the power supply had weakened over time and what used to be borderline OK had become a borderline failure. Miraculously, I happened to have a brand-new replacement power supply of the exact same model (6500126) which I got stuck with on a prior repair job. I tried the brand-new 200W supply and we still had the same problem. The peripherals in the machine, besides the Radeon card are 1 ISA modem card, 1 ISA sound card, 1 HDD, 1 floppy, 1 Zip drive, 1 CDRW. These components have all been there since before the Radeon card. While I had the new power supply hooked up, I tried disconnecting the Zip drive to see if that would give us the boost we needed but it did not. I cleaned everything out with a can of air so it should be cooling OK. All fans appear to be fine and nothing feels hot to the touch. This problem occurs even when the system is cold, however it may be a little worse when it gets hot (this is what first lead me in the direction of power supply). Just for a test, I replaced the hard disk with another and installed Win98SE from scratch (did not load ATI drivers). Even in this default state, 640x480 with MS VGA drivers, the problem occurred as soon as I maximized Internet Explorer. To me, this test eliminates software from my possibilities. So what do you all think? Could the power supply cause something like this (especially since the Radeon doc specifically asks for 300W)? I want to believe my friend that "it used to work fine" but I just think most people don't always pay that much attention. Given the power supply theory, could it be the content of the screen (i.e. mostly white) that pushes it over the edge? I tried different resolutions and that did not help. It occurred to me while typing this that one thing I did NOT try was disabling the secondary display. Do you suppose that the combined content of both displays trying to do "all white" is what draws more current than we have available? When we ask the video card to run both displays, will it need more juice? Does it take more power for a video card to display more bright colors, or white? Lastly, I would like to try a beefier power supply but I am afraid to hook up a standard ATX replacement. I've been under the impression that Gateway used a standard ATX connector but the pinouts may be different. The physical differences are obvious, but I may be able to do a little drilling and fabricating to make a standard ATX supply fit physically. It's just the electrical (pinout) part that scares me. I don't want to fry my friend's machine. If you've read this far, THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE! -Marty -- Marty |
#4
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Well, excess dust and dirt on the inside, preventing proper ventilation, could
also be a cause. Especially if the Radeon has its own cooling fan clogged with dirt. But I've seen defective monitors behave exactly as the OP described... Ben On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 14:20:43 -0500, Fireclown wrote: Ben Myers wrote: Marty, First, if the monitor is the one that came with the computer, it sounds like the monitor may be failing. Can you try another monitor? Second, yes, why not use a standard ATX power supply? The motherboard in the GP6-300 is a straight generic off-the-shelf Intel board with 440LX chipset, and the Gateway power supply is a standard one, a little light on the wattage. But I've seen worse: Packard Bell systems and some earlier Gateway systems with 145w power supplies. But first, try another monitor to see what effect the system has under the same conditions. If I had to place a bet on this one, I'd bet on a failing monitor... Ben Myers Ben has demonstrated his computer accumen. However, my money is on Marty's first suspicion, the power supply. If by some miracle the power supply isn't browning out, I would expect an eventual failure. However, as Ben says, check with a different monitor first before spending any money. Fireclown On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:09:47 +0000, Marty wrote: Sorry this is a long post. I hope someone will be persistent enough to help me out. I have been working on a friend's old Gateway 2000 GP6 (maybe G6?) 300MHz PII MMX system. It has a problem where the video "zaps out" frequently. I say that because the monitor literally makes a zapping sound as the screen contents quickly collapse into a bright white spot and then it goes black. The video card in question is an ATI Radeon 9000 64M AGP card that was installed by "some guy" a year or so ago because they needed to run two simultaneous displays (one on the monitor and another on the s-video output). I have determined that after the problem occurs, the OS (Win98 first edition) is not locked up. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to blindly shutdown or restart the machine. However, the video will not come back until the system is powered off/on (restart won't get it back). The problem seems to occur when the system tries to display a lot of white. For example, clicking maximize in a blank Internet Explorer window will do it every time. I have also noticed that by starting with a small IE window and dragging it bigger and bigger, the problem will occur when the window has almost filled the screen. First I thought this was a software problem (drivers or something), but now I don't think so. The Radeon manual says the system should have at least a 300-watt power supply. This system only has 200W. However, my friend insists that they did not always have this problem. I'm not so sure. I don't think one would really pay attention to wheteher they were doing things full-screen and/or what the color content of the screen was. Therefore I theorized that maybe the power supply had weakened over time and what used to be borderline OK had become a borderline failure. Miraculously, I happened to have a brand-new replacement power supply of the exact same model (6500126) which I got stuck with on a prior repair job. I tried the brand-new 200W supply and we still had the same problem. The peripherals in the machine, besides the Radeon card are 1 ISA modem card, 1 ISA sound card, 1 HDD, 1 floppy, 1 Zip drive, 1 CDRW. These components have all been there since before the Radeon card. While I had the new power supply hooked up, I tried disconnecting the Zip drive to see if that would give us the boost we needed but it did not. I cleaned everything out with a can of air so it should be cooling OK. All fans appear to be fine and nothing feels hot to the touch. This problem occurs even when the system is cold, however it may be a little worse when it gets hot (this is what first lead me in the direction of power supply). Just for a test, I replaced the hard disk with another and installed Win98SE from scratch (did not load ATI drivers). Even in this default state, 640x480 with MS VGA drivers, the problem occurred as soon as I maximized Internet Explorer. To me, this test eliminates software from my possibilities. So what do you all think? Could the power supply cause something like this (especially since the Radeon doc specifically asks for 300W)? I want to believe my friend that "it used to work fine" but I just think most people don't always pay that much attention. Given the power supply theory, could it be the content of the screen (i.e. mostly white) that pushes it over the edge? I tried different resolutions and that did not help. It occurred to me while typing this that one thing I did NOT try was disabling the secondary display. Do you suppose that the combined content of both displays trying to do "all white" is what draws more current than we have available? When we ask the video card to run both displays, will it need more juice? Does it take more power for a video card to display more bright colors, or white? Lastly, I would like to try a beefier power supply but I am afraid to hook up a standard ATX replacement. I've been under the impression that Gateway used a standard ATX connector but the pinouts may be different. The physical differences are obvious, but I may be able to do a little drilling and fabricating to make a standard ATX supply fit physically. It's just the electrical (pinout) part that scares me. I don't want to fry my friend's machine. If you've read this far, THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE! -Marty -- Marty |
#5
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Have you tried powering off the monitor but leaving the computer running?
The "zapping" sound probably comes from the monitor high voltage and should not be causable by any reasonable failure of the computer itself. (Also the collapse of the video screen into a single dot further points to the same condition.) After leaving it off for a short period turn it back on and see if the system is still "booted up" and the display comes on. "Marty" wrote in message ... Sorry this is a long post. I hope someone will be persistent enough to help me out. I have been working on a friend's old Gateway 2000 GP6 (maybe G6?) 300MHz PII MMX system. It has a problem where the video "zaps out" frequently. I say that because the monitor literally makes a zapping sound as the screen contents quickly collapse into a bright white spot and then it goes black. The video card in question is an ATI Radeon 9000 64M AGP card that was installed by "some guy" a year or so ago because they needed to run two simultaneous displays (one on the monitor and another on the s-video output). I have determined that after the problem occurs, the OS (Win98 first edition) is not locked up. I can use the keyboard shortcuts to blindly shutdown or restart the machine. However, the video will not come back until the system is powered off/on (restart won't get it back). The problem seems to occur when the system tries to display a lot of white. For example, clicking maximize in a blank Internet Explorer window will do it every time. I have also noticed that by starting with a small IE window and dragging it bigger and bigger, the problem will occur when the window has almost filled the screen. First I thought this was a software problem (drivers or something), but now I don't think so. The Radeon manual says the system should have at least a 300-watt power supply. This system only has 200W. However, my friend insists that they did not always have this problem. I'm not so sure. I don't think one would really pay attention to wheteher they were doing things full-screen and/or what the color content of the screen was. Therefore I theorized that maybe the power supply had weakened over time and what used to be borderline OK had become a borderline failure. Miraculously, I happened to have a brand-new replacement power supply of the exact same model (6500126) which I got stuck with on a prior repair job. I tried the brand-new 200W supply and we still had the same problem. The peripherals in the machine, besides the Radeon card are 1 ISA modem card, 1 ISA sound card, 1 HDD, 1 floppy, 1 Zip drive, 1 CDRW. These components have all been there since before the Radeon card. While I had the new power supply hooked up, I tried disconnecting the Zip drive to see if that would give us the boost we needed but it did not. I cleaned everything out with a can of air so it should be cooling OK. All fans appear to be fine and nothing feels hot to the touch. This problem occurs even when the system is cold, however it may be a little worse when it gets hot (this is what first lead me in the direction of power supply). Just for a test, I replaced the hard disk with another and installed Win98SE from scratch (did not load ATI drivers). Even in this default state, 640x480 with MS VGA drivers, the problem occurred as soon as I maximized Internet Explorer. To me, this test eliminates software from my possibilities. So what do you all think? Could the power supply cause something like this (especially since the Radeon doc specifically asks for 300W)? I want to believe my friend that "it used to work fine" but I just think most people don't always pay that much attention. Given the power supply theory, could it be the content of the screen (i.e. mostly white) that pushes it over the edge? I tried different resolutions and that did not help. It occurred to me while typing this that one thing I did NOT try was disabling the secondary display. Do you suppose that the combined content of both displays trying to do "all white" is what draws more current than we have available? When we ask the video card to run both displays, will it need more juice? Does it take more power for a video card to display more bright colors, or white? Lastly, I would like to try a beefier power supply but I am afraid to hook up a standard ATX replacement. I've been under the impression that Gateway used a standard ATX connector but the pinouts may be different. The physical differences are obvious, but I may be able to do a little drilling and fabricating to make a standard ATX supply fit physically. It's just the electrical (pinout) part that scares me. I don't want to fry my friend's machine. If you've read this far, THANK YOU VERY MUCH IN ADVANCE! -Marty -- Marty |
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