Q: I reccently purchased a good graphics card, a Radeon HD 3870, and for some reason isnt working properly. Im sure my PC is capable of running the games and using the graphics card. But for some reason whenever I go on a game that requires deccent graphics after a few minutes the screen goes blank and my PC has crashed. It does this near enough everytime and im quite sick of it. But the thing is, I had one of these cards before and it ran the games fine and it was nice and smooth, but due to the card breaking it was returned and this is the replacement they sent. Does anyone know why this would happen? Thanks in advance :) Well my Dad seems to think it could be that my power supply isnt powerful enough to run my card as well as it could. Do you think this could be the case for the card I have? And if so what sorta power supply would I need to buy and how much money are you looking at? Cheers Brian, I looked at my power supply before and cant remember what it is but it definatly was 500W so maybe ill invest in a new one. How much would one be that would be appropriate for my pc and card?
A: hi danny your dad could be right,most of the high end cards these days use a massive amount of juice,infact within the p.c the graphic card(s) use more power than any other peice of hardware for a radeon HD3870 you should be looking at a 500watt at least,however allthough a 400watt may work fine when combined with your other hardware and in situations like a dvd burn more power may be needed so its allways best going for at least 500watt the main reason for pc crashes is cooling and driver incompatibility,is your case efficently cooled and are you using the updated drivers also dont use Y splitters or converters when powering your new card,if needed buy a power supply that comes with 6pin pci-express connectors,allthough the 4pin>6pin converters work ok you cant be sure they are working ok if the card is a "agp" version then also edit the "agp aperture size" allways lower the size,so if its 256mb then lower it to 128mb,or even 64mb other bios settings to check are : init display first : this is the display device that bios will use first,set it to your appropriate graphics interface(agp/pci-express) video bios cachable : make sure this is disabled for agp cards set agp bandwidth to auto also on agp card enable agp fast writing finally the HD3870 uses the latest pci-express 2.0 version,however these cards should be backwards compatible with the older boards,but check with your motherboard manual just to be sure good luck danny !