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General discussion

Very weak power supply, I cant switch to higher wattage

Apr 27, 2006 8:00PM PDT

I bought my computer off of Ebay for 800 bucks, is it a custom built computer, and it came with an LCD 17 inch Dell monitor. It is a 3 GHz Pentium 4 w/HT, 2 gigs of RAM, 160 gig hard drive, 256 megabyte Nvidia GeForce FX 6600 and external Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! USB sound card. Alltogether, ot works, well, kinda ok. The problem is, it only has a 112 watt power supply. It can switch to 230 watts, but when I try to start the computer when the switch is on 212 Watts, it doesnt start. It powers on, but doesn't boot. So, since it runs with such low power supply, the graphice card doesnt seem to run very well, causing severe tearing and shearing of the graphics. Very anoying. Does anyone know how I can fix this? The power supply has a switch to chose between 112 and 230, but man, it doesnt work on 230 watts. I went to some randome power usage calculator online and I gave it all of my system specs, and it says I need about 200 watts to run, but I am running the computer with 112 watts. So friggin anoying. Can someone pls help me?

Discussion is locked

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(NT) (NT) This is OBE per post in another forum
Apr 29, 2006 9:20AM PDT
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wattage increase
May 7, 2006 9:54AM PDT

Sounds to me like you are changing voltage not wattage. Unless you have a power supply like I have never seen. 112 watts isnt enough to run my video card much less a loaded p4 computer. What makes you think you need more power? Is the power supply a standard size? If so you can buy more power but not by flipping that little switch that says 115/230. Im surprised it still works. You should have around 300watts. I run a 580 watt and my video card still sometimes says it is going into a safer mode of accelleration due to the lack of sufficient power.