Power Supplies and Rise of Flight

So I discovered something recently that really fascinated me. It seems that Rise of Flight taxes my power supply and video card more than any other game that I currently play. The reason I believe this is that I get random occurences while playing ROF where my monitor will go black and the GPU fan will accelerate to 100% speed. I dont hear any beeping though but all I can then do at that point is shut down the PC and boot back up.

I'm running an ATI 5850 and I discovered that my power supply (500 watts) just meets the minimum recommended power! So...I went to Newegg.com today and bought myself a 750w Corsair power supply.

Power supplies are critical thats why I only PC Power and Cooling for power. I have a 750 now but could use more.

Actually ROF is not that bad on ps and gp but COD is the worst giving me gp temps of 70 while ROF gives me an even 62.

Did you by any chance have ATI Tray Tools installed?

I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I just have the drivers installed.

Does the Tray Tools app cause problems?

500 watts with only 5850???
What is your other system specs?
As i have overclocked i7 930 with two ATI 5870 (aint counting HHD and other stuff) - and its max in ROF only 550-580 watts.
Maximum what i took when i was testing ROF with 2xNV GTX295 (quad SLI mode) - it was 650 watts.

Intel Duo Core E6850
One Hard Drive
4 GB RAM
Win 7 64 bit
One ATI 5850
One 22" widescreen monitor

Still, I'll go by AMD's recommendations and get a better power supply. I don't want to be using something that just meets the minimum power requirements for the 5850.

Also keep in mind that powersupplies lose efficiency over time, as well as their ability to take a load at their original rated max watt. For example, a 3 year old 500W powersupply will probably only allow a 470W-480W load, at 60%-70% efficiency.

My specs are in my sig, and with ROF running with the 3 monitors plugged into to the same UPS/AVR as my PC, the UPS/AVR tells me my total load is about 540W-580W running ROF.

Excellent point and yes, my current PS is older than 3 years. My new 750w PS is already on its way.

Yes indeed, latest ATT version with ATI cards is known to cause "100% GPU fan with PC crash" effect.

I run ATT and don't get that problem... But I'm running an older driver (CCC 10.12).

Good move on the new Corsair. I made the mistake of getting a cheap PSU while running with my X1950XT a few years back - which duly died well before its time. I now have a 650w Corsair. Buy cheap, pay twice.

And always go well beyond the minimum required for any given component when choosing a new PSU.


70 under load isn't really that bad is it?

Thanks for the info. Much appreciated.

The interesting thing with my experience though is that my crashes + 100% GPU fan have only occured while playing ROF. I play a bunch of other games and I've not had the crash occur at all with them.

Maybe too obvious, but don't forget to blow out all the dust and crap that builds up on the gpu fan. Just saying because I forget as well, and it is summer in the Northern hemisphere after all.

I had an X1900XT and it overheated consistently after about 3 months due to dust build up because of poor fan design. I went through 3 of them on warranty before giving up.

OK first we go for a decent calculation, like in:
http://www.coolermaster.com/support/psu_calculator.php
http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp
http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com/

then go for the certify AMD PSU selection on the AMD site:
http://support.amd.com/us/certified/power-supplies/Pages/listing.aspx
To get the listed PSU of your choice inhere.

But remember, like I wrote down in the RoF forum, remove all the old nVidia drivers by using the http://www.guru3d.com/category/driversweeper/
These hidden leftovers could give a conflict!!

You could also download a stress testing software like from 3D-mark to check if the problem still occur, at 100% Vcard load.

Good luck!!

I already did this a couple days ago and removed every vestige of Nvidia drivers from my PC. Thanks!

I think the problem is just gremlins.



The Jedi Master

Thats right, PSU`s efficiency and peak power decrease over time, but it`s especially true with 500 watt`s which actually die a lot faster if they constantly have to run at near full potential, Took me 6 years to kill a 500 Watt PSU by steadily upgrading and increasing performance in the chassis of my PC, the hardware it uses now didnt even need 5 months to kill the next brand new 500W at which time I went over to a big Mist psu.

Running RoF on an iMac through bootcamp and from what I can see the power supply is 305W and I've never had any ooutage problems; everything's as smooth as a nut even on max. settings.

Does tend to get a tad hot over time though which is to be expected for an all in one machine.

I just looked it up online and I ordered my current 500w PS from Newegg in November of 2006! So I guess getting almost 5 years use out of it isn't too shabby.

I'll be sure to post my results here with ROF after I've installed the new 750w PS.

I flew about 5 hours of ROF this weekend with the new power supply and everything went perfectly smooth!

I'm glad I got this new PS since I'll be upgrading my mobo/cpu/memory later this year.

I remeber getting all kind of strange stuff when playing Il-2. Back then, I didn`t care for the PS and bought some no-name stuff. Lesson learned, never did that again, always buy Enermax, Coolermaster, BeQuiet etc. nowadays.