Because I was in a rush to make
my previous post I skipped over your question, so I want to back up a little.
"...does
Windows do anything special when using 4GB that would make it run
like shit if 2GB is taken away? It's running so slow and
thrashing the HDD constantly".
Not particularly.
Obviously, it depends on what's loading at startup. If
what's loaded consumes more than 2GB, the overflow is pushed out
to the swapfile/pagefile on the HDD, which would account for all
the drive thrashing.
To get a cursory view of what's
running (and how much memory is consumed by each item) you can use the
Task Manager and/or Resource Monitor. For how to interpret various indicators see
Measuring memory usage in Windows 7. For a more granular view you can download the free
Process Explorer
from MS's SysInternals division.
It's like Task Manager on steroids, and will let you identify
hidden processes nested by either SvcHost.exe or
RunDll32.exe.
You can use the
MSconfig
utility to prevent unneeded/unused
programs from loading at startup. (AutoRuns
is the free steroids version of MSconfig).
You can do the same for Windows Services; have a look at the
Black Viper's
site. Be sure to see his
Win7 SP1 Service Configurations
page. By disabling unneeded/unused
services and programs you can significantly shave your memory footprint.
You may also care to see
RAM, Virtual Memory,
Pagefile and all that stuff,
which should give you a better idea of their relationship to each other.
Various versions had been previously published by MS as KB2267427 and
KB555223, both of which have been removed.
Moving on to your immediate
problem, unless you know for sure that the "lovely fop sound"
you heard came from the PSU, I would be cautious. If you can, try substituting another
known-good supply before buying a new one. You want to make
sure the supply you had been using didn't take anything else with
it for the ride over the cliff.
I'm assuming you've run your requirements by a few of those
PSU Calculators?
(Thermaltake has their
own
calculator).
The
PSU Stickies
at the Overclockers forum are also a good resource.
The 575 Watt Thermaltake Toughpower XT (P/N
TPX-575M)
has good specs all around. It's a similar design to the
Corsair TX650,
so you may want to look at a few PSUs from Corsair.
I also took a look at the 550 Watt
OCZ Fatal1ty Series.
Personally, I would go with the
Thermaltake. Not only for the better warranty (which is a
good measure of the vendor's confidence level and expected
MTTF/MTBF),
and the solid dielectric capacitors. But, according to
Newegg, it's also
EPS12V
(v2.91) compliant.
Because EPS12V supplies are often employed for high-reliability
server use they use a failsafe design that minimizes the
likelihood of follow-on (domino effect) damage of anything
connected to them.
From my perspective, unless it's
a throwaway box, the PSU is not the place to pinch pennies.
Something else to consider is
what I call the "dust bunny margin". What many
used to do is deliberately oversize the supply to obtain
additional thermal margin before having to clean out the dust
bunnies. Unfortunately, with many new, high-efficiency
models (compared to older, lower wattage units) there is often no
increase in heatsink size or fan CFM when going to a higher
wattage model. The result being there's no increase in dust
bunny margin before overheating occurs. So you wind up
having to clean it out with greater frequency.
It's worth noting that excess
heat can significantly reduce the life of most passive components.
For instance, electrolytic capacitors are typically rated for use
at a nominal temperature of 25°C. For every 10°C above
that temperature the rated MTTF (i.e., expected life) will go
down by half. So if a part is rated for 50K hours at 25°C,
it's only going to get 25K hours at 35°C. Just something
to keep in mind when premature failures are encountered.
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ComtronBob
"It is not possible to undertake vast projects with half-vast personnel"
Red,
white, and
blue
banner seen hanging across aircraft assembly hanger.
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