8800 GTX - not receiving sufficient power, The NVIDIA System Sentinel... Options

[brpearc]

My brand new graphics card (with new power supply) is giving me headaches. Every time I start Windows XP (32-bit), this error comes up:

--------------
The NVIDIA System Sentinel is reporting that the NVIDIA-powered graphics card is not receiving sufficient power.

To protect your hardware from potential damage or causing a potential system lockup, the graphics processor has lowered its performance to a level that allows continued safe operations.
--------------

This is the graphics card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16814130079

This is the power supply (which was linked to by newegg upon trying to add the graphics card to the cart):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817189016
which is 1000w with two 12v rails @ 35A

I have searched far and wide, and found that people have been having similar problems ever since the geforce fx 5600. In most of these cases, the power supply was simply too weak for the load. However, several are also like me, and have power supplies that are overkill if anything. Some of these were solved by reseating the graphics card and/or 6-pin power plugs. One guy even cut down the plastic around the connections to make the plugs fit better. I have not yet gotten to the cutting of plastic.

Sorry if this is hard to follow, but here goes:

As mostly visible in the newegg picture, the PSU has 8x 4-pin molex connectors split between two cords and 4x 6-pin PCIe connectors, also split between two cords. Also I should note there are 8x SATA power connectors once again split between two cords.

I have a hard drive, dvd burner, 3 case fans, and the LED lights in the front of the case all plugged in to one 4-pin cord, leaving the other 4-pin cord free. 3 of the SATA connectors are in use on hard drives, all sharing the same cord and once again leaving one cord free.

This leaves me with several options to power the graphics card. I have tried several basic combinations of the 6-pin PCIe connectors built in to the power supply - both plugs from one cord and one plug from each cord.

I have also tried the 2x 4-pin to 6-pin adapters provided with the graphics card (plugging them in to the free 4-pin molex cord) and a combination of those adapters and the 6-pin connectors built in to the power supply.

So essentially, I have tried virtually all combinations of plug-ins (except to split the hard drive, case fan, and GPU loads both between the 4-pin molex connectors) and had no success.

I have tried reseating the graphics card and unplugging unnecessary hard drives and DVD burner.

My MSI Dual Core Center that came with motherboard tells me that the GPU is running at 621mhz and video ram at 999mhz, which is what it is supposed to run at, regardless of the sentinel lowering the GPU performance. (and yet the performance is definitely not what it should be) It also tells me the 12v power is running at 11.97v (speedfan tells me the same). It has always said that since installing the new GFX card.

I have tried the drivers from the cd as well as the latest from Nvidia.com, and I even tried Vista 64-bit business edition with a driver from September, which resulted in the same performance levels as I am getting in XP.

The result of all this is that the shiny new 8800gtx runs a little slower than the 7900gs it replaced (which, by the way, worked fine with this power supply for the last two days while the 8800 was stuck in a UPS hub over thanksgiving). Obviously the 7900gs uses less power, and only used one of the PSU's built in 6-pin connectors.

Finally, powering the system with only one connector plugged in resulted in the same error message as before once logged in to windows, though I did not try running any games like that.

Well, I can't think of anything more to say about this, and this description is certainly more thorough than any I have found in my searching. The only thing that sticks out in my mind is that maybe, just maybe the nvidia sentinel is jumping the gun a bit with the 11.97v (I believe the power supply delivered 12.03v when the 7900 gs was in) and triggerring a low-power mode without good reason.

Does anyone have some insight into this problem?

This post has been edited by brpearc: Nov 24 2007, 02:18 AM