Legit Reviews

NVidia System Sentinel keeps warning me that my evga 8800 GTS is not receiving enough power and that performance is degraded. I receive the message for many days in a row then it goes away for a while and then reappears.

An FSP X3 300 watt (12V – 25 amp) PSU is dedicated to the 8800 and is connected to no other device. I measure, with a FLUKE DVM, a consistent 12.1V no matter what the load on the 8800 or the rest of the system. I measure that voltage ON THE 8800 CARD on the card side of the connector where the PCI-E 12V 6-pin cable plugs into the card.

The nVidia Monitor shows the voltage on PCI-E to be 1.2V and has a green box to the left of the PCI-E. The nForce voltage is 1.5 and HT(SPP-MCP) voltage is 1.2 and both have green boxes. With all those green boxes – system sentinel still tells me the card performance is degraded.

When I increase the voltages to 1.3 (PCI-E and HT) and nForce to 1.6 the boxes turn yellow but still I get the same message even though the monitor reports a higher voltage.

NTune 5.05.54 also reports the same voltages. RIVA Tuner also reports very similar (+/- .05V) results.

I run a standard Flight Simulator X / DX10 benchmark (FSXMark07) using FRAPS and find no difference in the average or maximum frame rate when the warning message appears or does not appear. And the frame rates are almost identical to those reported by several other users of FSXMark07 with nearly identical hardware configurations:

VISTA 32bit
E6600
4 Meg RAM
8800GTS (169.25 12/11/07)
CoolMax 600 watt PSU for all system hardware except the 8800 GTS
FSP X3 300 watt PSU dedicated to the 8800GTS

The problem occurs on the same hardware when running Win/XP/SP1 with a169.21 driver but the same version of nVidia monitor and nTune.

The NVIDIA specs call for a minimum PSU of 400 watts for the entire system when a 8800 GTS is installed. I can find no test that shows the 8800 GTS card drawing more than 250 watts. And, more importantly, the voltage on my card never drops below 12.1V so an excess current draw from the 8800 is not pulling down the X3 PSU voltage.

Is the system sentinel giving me a bogus warning?

How can a dedicated 300 watt PSU be inadequate for a single 8800 GTS?

If you think the warning is valid where else on the 8800 card can I measure voltages to verify there really is a problem?

what kind of mobo do you have? it might be that the pcie power connector is supplying enough power, but the mother board isnt

Is it the G92 GTS (512MB), or the older GTS (640MB?) or even the 320MB one? As they all use different amounts of power.

8800 GTS ________#############| 106W ² (640MB)
8800 GTS ________############}|' 103W ² (320MB)
8800 GTS ________###########} 92W ^ (512MB G92)

Maybe it's a faulty X3, it could be supplying the right voltages, but not enough amps?

Plug the card directly into your main PSU, and see if you still get errors.

Dan

The new G92 cards are great cards, and for a large majority, this issue will not apply. This is simply a warning, and also a little helpful info if it does apply to you.

I installed a Geforce 8800GTS 512 and installed latest 169.28 drivers, only to have Nvidia Sentinel program state that the card was not receiving sufficient power, and therefore reduced the frequencies of the core and memory. I checked NTUNE and the core only dropped by 1 MHz (from 670 to 669), but trying to benchmark with 3DMARK06 or play COD4 gave me about 5 fps. So I tried both of my 6 pin PCI-E cables coming from the PSU, neither fixed it. I tried the adapter from 2x Molex ATA to 6 pin PCI-E, which came with the video card, and that didn't fix it either.

I flashed my mainboard bios to the latest, video card bios to the latest, and using all the latest drivers. I even tried same version of drivers for the video card from different manufacturers and from nvidia. I spent time on the phone with EVGA, the card manufacturer, and they could only conclude that the card was defective and should be RMA'd, I did so and got another one from the egg. SAME PROBLEM!!!

My system specs:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 @ 2.933 GHz
OCZ DDR2-800 2GB Dual Channel Kit
EVGA NF68 680i SLI Motherboard
Upgraded from 7950 GX2 to 8800GTS
Enermax Galaxy 1000W 75Amp(+12V rails) Power Supply (Not the DXX, I don't know if this issue applies to the newer DXX line or not)

Days of searching through forums yielded some vague, but helpful information. This problem seems to be affecting many, but noone has "official" info on what is causing the problem. It seems to affect certain PSU/Mainboard/8800 G92 combonations, which is quite many. According to some tech support reps. from some PSU makers, such as Antec, the problem
is caused by the newer Nvidia drivers. The driver is some how directing how the card is drawing power from the PCI-Express slot and the 6 pin PCI-Express power connections. This IS NOT due to lack of wattage or amps that the PSU can provide... mine supplies 1000 Watts and 75 Amps over the +12V rails. Many others with this problem have various other brands/models/ratings that should have WAY more than enough to power these cards.

This is affecting various brands of the G92 8800GT/GTS cards... with various power supplies (but only certain models)... and various motherboards... so this is NOT exclusive to the EGVA cards or motherboards, nor the Enermax brand of PSUs.

I ended up going to a local computer store and purchasing a cheaper Ultra LSP 750 Watt 45 Amp (single +12V rail) PSU for testing this theory that certain PSU/Motherboard combos were having issues with the G92s. I installed it.... and the SENTINEL WARNING WAS GONE!!!! This did indeed fix my problem! I don't understand, and frankly, am quite angry that I had to pay an extra $150 to downgrade from my beloved Enermax Galaxy, but now the 8800GTS works!!! I hope they fix this crap with revised drivers soon!

Some links that helped me, and may help you if you have this problem and want to do some research before spending 100s without knowing for sure:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview ... id=2141003

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=55320

http://evga.com/forums/tm.asp?m=226317& ... y=&#226481

http://houseofhelp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=64885

Oh and all my Voltage readings from the Enermax Galaxy read well within specifications, in case you were wondering.

Antec’s TruePower Quattro power supplies, the TPQ-850 and TPQ-1000 have way more than enough power to run an 8800 graphics card and are SLI certified by NVIDIA. The actual issue with the graphics card and System Sentinel is a communication issue. The Supply has plenty of power, but the card is not handling it properly.

This problem is not only with the Antec supply. Other brands of power supply are having these issues as well. There have been reports of power supplies from
Corsair, ThermalTake, Enermax, Rosewill, OCZ, XCLIO, and Silverstone not working with these cards as well.

Nvidia SLI certified our power supply to work with the cards. Months after the launch of their card we started to have problems with the 8800GTX and the Quattro supplies. We implemented a fix at this time because we were the only company with the issue. This fix worked for any user having the 8800GTX issue.

Then Nvidia released the (G92) core series of graphics cards GTS/GT. These cards sometimes do not work with either the original or fixed version of our power supply. We have been researching the issue, and Nvidia has been testing this issue in their labs. The problem appears to be a hardware interaction. With the right (wrong?) motherboard/graphics card/PSU, this issue occurs. Many combinations work, however (we’ve got an off-the-shelf Crosshair+8800GT 512+Quattro 850 system running perfectly in our lab), so changing any of the components could possibly make the system work. It seems that a bios fix/flash is going to be the final solution, but we don’t have any definite answers at this time.

Cool LR got big enough to warrant us an antec rep ^_^

Welcome to the forums Mr/Miss/Mrs Antec Rep.

Dan

They have posted new drivers for the Sentinel issue.

8800GT/GTS G92 and Low Power Warning

And that's MR. Antec Rep to y'all!! Glad to help!

Thanks, I had the same issue and Dan alerted me to this thread. Cleared everything right up.

Scary part is that I was ready to RMA both the Video card and the PSU, and they both were fine.

Trust me, getting that Sentinel message is downright frustrating.