A long and sad tale.

[Alex81388]

PSU problem, Then you have temperature issues.

 

[Nubius]

over the past 2 months they've gone to absolute crap..

Psht try the last few years dude.

That graphics card is pretty anemic, too. It may just be getting blown out of the water,

Highly doubt it. I have two friends with the 9600XT, one with the 128mb other with the 256mb, they can handle HL2 just fine.

ATLEAST - 24A on your +12V rail,

Unless you're running SLI with tons of other hardware, a minimum of 20a will be more than sufficient for that setup.

You need to go into the BIOS or use motherboard monitor 5 and monitor your voltages. If you see your +12v line dropping to like 11.5v and below, then yes you need a much stronger PSU with +12v rail, same goes for the others, if the +3.3 is even down at 3v or the +5v is below 4.7v then your PSU is being over taxed by quite a bit.

If your numbers are like this:

+3.33
+4.96
+11.95

then your PSU is right on, and is not being taxed beyond it's capabilities, up to 5% fluctuation is normal, if it hits 5% or exceeds it, is when you start having probs

An Athlon 2600+ XP running at 53C is completely normal, especially for stock heatsink, so all these posts about 'Its overheating' simply arent true...I've had a hotter XP with stock heatsink thats still running strong to this day. I assume it'll hit near 60C on full load, which technically it can handle, but I would indeed suggest in better case flow, colder room in the house, better heatsink or all of the above.

 

[craig46]

At the moment on idle the temps look like this.
+12v = 12.224
+5v = 4.919
+3.3v = 3.312

CPU = 52 c

 

[Apokalipse]

Psht try the last few years dude.

was he talking about AMD?
if he was, tell him to look at Intel's 600 series benchmarks. the 3.73 EE got outperformed by the 500 series 3.4 EE and even the 3.2 non-EE at times!
if anything, Intel have done worse on their 600 series CPU's. the only good thing is the reduction in power consumption

Highly doubt it. I have two friends with the 9600XT, one with the 128mb other with the 256mb, they can handle HL2 just fine.

hell yeah, I've even seen Doom 3 run on an FX-5200

anyway, did you do a repair-install of XP after replacing the motherboard? (assuming you did)

 

[Nubius]

was he talking about AMD?

He was talking about ASUS boards, unless you're talking about intel or AMD specific ASUS board.

 

[Apokalipse]

oh okay, well Asus are still pretty good, even though they are not as good as they were

 

[Nubius]

lol you should know he wasn't talking about AMD's quality going down hill because I wouldn't have said 'try a couple years ago dude' if he was talkin about AMD


ahh freakin cut my finger with a razor blade about an hour ago, hurts to type lol

 

[Apokalipse]

why were you using a razor blade?

 

[craig46]

anyway, did you do a repair-install of XP after replacing the motherboard? (assuming you did)

Yes.... completely fresh install with my newly bought Win XP Pro!

 

[Nubius]

why were you using a razor blade?

Was trying to peel off the multiple layers of my old drivers license