Power Supply LED

armadillo_115

armadillo_115

Got a PC power supply on the way. Was a good price, but it has bright blue LED light(s). I detest bright lights on a computer.

Never fooled with LED's. What's the best way to disable the LED? Cut one of the wires?

Need more juice for the graphics card I ordered for this dinosaur desktop. When I play solitaire.... I want to see those cards snap. :deadhorse:
 
LED = Light Emitting Diode. You may snip one of the legs of the diode, put a piece of black tape over it, or paint it with black or other color fingernail polish.
 
Thanks! Thought I could cut it without any problems, just wanted to be sure.

Also ordered a pcie 2.0 to sata 3.0 card. I have a sata ssd installed, but the sata 2 ports on my motherboard really kill the speed. These upgrades should keep this old dino chugging along until I do a full upgrade. I don't aim to pay the crazy prices they want for new motherboards and cpu's now. :crazy:

Once I do a full upgrade... these parts will go in a spare backup dinosaur. (Even older)

EDIT: If there was only a way to bump these 8gigs of DDR3 up to 12(or more) gigs of DDR4.... I'd be happy with it for a loooong time.
 
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Hey Hey. Don't bash those dinosaurs so fast. I've saved "a few" for customers to last long enough to justify buying a new one.
I have an older Asus Formula board. Put a Xeon in it. As much ram as it could support (12 gigs). I got no complaints after slapping in an Nvidia 1080ti gpu.
You didn't mention your mobo. A search for <your board> modded firmware might turn up something. A lot of times new microcode and internal chipset firmware and just general performance tweaks are included.
I dunno. Sometimes 2 SATA chipsets are on a motherboard. Mine has a Marvell and an Intel ICH10. I run RAID 0 (mirror??) on my file server and workbench pc's. For some reason the Marvell 6 gbps ports are a bit more peppy.
One is running 2 Seagate SATA 2tb drives scrounged from satellite receivers and the other 2 Crucial 1tb SSD's (bought with hard cash...lol). Partitioned for os and storage. Paging file on partition 2.
Older boards run quite good with Windows OS if you find a debolated version. My favorite of late is Ghost Spectre 10 & 11. Not much Windows extra 'crap' is there but installing it and more is a breeze.
It activates and updates. And is pretty darned fast.
Not really a big boon to performance is hanging a USB stick on the back and using Readyboost. It makes a little bit of difference in performance here and there. But don't expect magic.
My engineer friend from Taiwan once told me "Evly machine have it rimitation". But he also said "A man who master electlicity master the world". Kind of true, don't you think?
 
armadillo_115 said:
Got a PC power supply on the way. Was a good price, but it has bright blue LED light(s). I detest bright lights on a computer.

Never fooled with LED's. What's the best way to disable the LED? Cut one of the wires?

Need more juice for the graphics card I ordered for this dinosaur desktop. When I play solitaire.... I want to see those cards snap. :deadhorse:
Click to expand...

Black permanent marker, just color it over. Works fine for me. If you ever want to have it light up some time in the future, you can wipe it off with a little IPA.
 
A small piece of black electrical tape does wonders. Also does a good job on those embedded web cams, keeps peeps from spying on you without you knowing.
 
ArloG said:
Hey Hey. Don't bash those dinosaurs so fast. I've saved "a few" for customers to last long enough to justify buying a new one.
I have an older Asus Formula board. Put a Xeon in it. As much ram as it could support (12 gigs). I got no complaints after slapping in an Nvidia 1080ti gpu.
You didn't mention your mobo. A search for <your board> modded firmware might turn up something. A lot of times new microcode and internal chipset firmware and just general performance tweaks are included.
I dunno. Sometimes 2 SATA chipsets are on a motherboard. Mine has a Marvell and an Intel ICH10. I run RAID 0 (mirror??) on my file server and workbench pc's. For some reason the Marvell 6 gbps ports are a bit more peppy.
One is running 2 Seagate SATA 2tb drives scrounged from satellite receivers and the other 2 Crucial 1tb SSD's (bought with hard cash...lol). Partitioned for os and storage. Paging file on partition 2.
Older boards run quite good with Windows OS if you find a debolated version. My favorite of late is Ghost Spectre 10 & 11. Not much Windows extra 'crap' is there but installing it and more is a breeze.
It activates and updates. And is pretty darned fast.
Not really a big boon to performance is hanging a USB stick on the back and using Readyboost. It makes a little bit of difference in performance here and there. But don't expect magic.
My engineer friend from Taiwan once told me "Evly machine have it rimitation". But he also said "A man who master electlicity master the world". Kind of true, don't you think?
Click to expand...

This Dino may not be as obsolete as I thought. I updated the bios. Some more recent info says max ram is now 16gbs rather than 8 GBS. But there is conflicting info even when using the correct board version. (Originally, max was only 4 gigs)

I took a chance and ordered a 2 x 4GBS dual channel kit for $17.90. If it works with 16 gigs total, I will be happy. If not, I'm not out much cabbage. :egypt:

Last/final bios update was in 2011. :shocked22:
 
You can also upgrade to SATA 3 with this hummer if you have a spare PCIe slot available.

Code: 
https://www.amazon.com/Tangxi-Controller-Express-Brackets-Expansion/dp/B07VH57N3Q
 
Terryl said:
You can also upgrade to SATA 3 with this hummer if you have a spare PCIe slot available./QUOTE]

Thanks Terryl. I have already ordered a double sata 3.0 card, PCIE 2.0 compatible. Linux and Windoze bootable. My PCIE 2.0 slot will limit my SSD's and the new RX 580 2048SP Graphic Card to some degree.... But should still be much better than what I have now.


ArloG said: BTW. What is the actual board? Bios updates are usually a good thing. Good luch with the ram. It will pep it up a lot.

Arlo.... SUPERMICRO MBD-C2SEE-O LGA 775 G43 with a Intel Core2 Quad CPU Q9500 @ 2.83GHz. (A beast back in the day)
I bought this board with a lesser CPU used about 18 months ago. Upgraded the CPU a while back.

Provided these next upgrades all work.... this is as far as this build can be pushed. (Board and CPU are over-clockable, but I don't like doing that) It already does all I need .... but be nice to do it all faster. lol
Click to expand...
 
I have two overclocked older MSI X58 motherboards which I have used for over six years each. Now both sitting in the closet, but could easily be resurrected by installing a used cpu. Uncanny how they both started to have WIN 10 BSD boot problems within a month of each other. Both were air cooled and overclocked to 4004 mhz. One actually hit 4300 mhz but I dialed it back to 4004 for longevity.

My latest build is with a MSI Z390 gaming board which is liquid cooled and overclocked which should last for a few years. Can't beat liquid cooling for overclocking purposes. Tried Win 11 on this board, but went back to Win10 due to personal likes and dislikes.

If your bios supports UEFI, it helps in boot speed if you convert your boot drive from legacy to UEFI in WIN10 or Win 11.

Just my 2 cents.
 
Power supply, graphics card, and another ssd disk installed. Still waiting on ram and the Sata 3.0 card. Also need to get some Sata 3.0 cables. It appears all I have is a ton of older sata cables. Already showing much better system scores. :thumbup:

Power supply came in plain box, no papers of any kind. LED wasn't bright after all. Didn't bother to clip it. Runs quiet and strong.

Graphics card had no documentation or driver cd. (And no Sata 3.0 cable. Grrr) Graphics card gave me fits before Windows 11 finally installed the driver correctly. Had to remove driver twice. Kept partially installing for some reason. Third try finally got it right. My Linux distros installed correct driver on first boots.

Windows 11 and one 'nix distro cloned to new ssd disk. Then that older ssd was reformatted for my storage drive and a Windows restore partition. Some other partitions moved around between the three ssd's to make system more efficient.

To do: Windows restore and Linux TimeShift partitions will have to be remapped and re-backed up. I'll redo the Linux's Fstab's after the Sata 3.0 card is installed and all disks are in the final ports/ final partitions. No point doing it twice. :egypt:
 
UserBenchmarks results so far:

Before > Now
Gaming 6% > Gaming 20%
Desktop 48% > Desktop 61%
Workstation 5% > Workstation 15%

I'm not over-clocking, so that skews the percentages in the database.
My motherboard doesn't have UEFI or XMP ram settings.

EDIT: Found 3 Sata 3.0 cables in my stash. Still have not found 2 Sata 3.0 premium (round type) cables that I know I put up somewhere. When you save EVERYTHING... it's hard to find any ONE thing. lol
 
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Bit of an update.
The good: Additional 8gigs of ram functioning after bios update.
The bad: No improvement on UserBenchMarks score. At this point, ram overclocking would probably yield improvement. I'm not a gamer so I doubt I will fool with that... unless just out of curiosity.

As to the PCIE Sata 3.0 card:
My PCIE is only 2.0. I was expecting slower SSD speed than a 3.0 SATA motherboard slot would provide.... but hoping for more than my motherboards SATA 2.0. Unfortunately I'm now getting about 20 read/writes less. With two SSD's on the card, the speed is split between them. (Both disks combined is slightly over 300, so there is still hope) BTW: SSD's are now listed as SATA 3.0.

My next step will be to temporarily unplug the second SSD and re-run UserBenchMarks. If that speeds the windoze disk up, there is a workaround. I can disable automount in windoze and then plug the second disk back in. Too bad windoze doesn't offer better disk control. <grrr> (Nomount in Linux is much simpler) Whenever I get around to it.

In case anyone considers buying this PCIE SATA 3.0 card:
Installing the card was a royal PITA! Manufacture says to re-install Win11 after inserting the card in an acpi or uefi system. Skru dat. I first followed the advice of an on-line poster: I inserted the card without the ssd's hooked to it. Win11 would no longer boot, nor could it repair itself.

I removed the card. Win 11 finally booted after about 15 minutes. I installed the card drivers FIRST. Shutdown and installed the card w/o drives attached. After a few successful boots I then plugged in the drives. Booted into Win11 ok and did a driver repair just to be safe. All seems copacetic now.

Boot time increases about 10 seconds because of an additional screen. Something like Boot from PCI Sata? Hit any key to escape. Yadda yadda
 
"I removed the card. Win 11 finally booted after about 15 minutes. I installed the card drivers FIRST. Shutdown and installed the card w/o drives attached. After a few successful boots I then plugged in the drives. Booted into Win11 ok and did a driver repair just to be safe. All seems copacetic now."

Just in case... did you check your system files to be sure none were corrupt? In time windoze will start to do strange things if one or two system files get corrupted. Easiest way to check is to create a short cut on your desktop and under properties add C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe. Once you click on the icon and see

Dos Prompt.webp

Type sfc /scannow and let windoze do its thing to find system files that might be corrupt. Better safe than sorry later on.......
 
Good advice on the sfc /scannow, eastof111. Hadn't gotten to that yet but went ahead and ran it today. Found/fixed several errors, mostly due to: partial graphic card drivers previously. And removing old tbs card without removing drivers. All systems go now.

I booted windows with the second ssd unplugged... no difference in disk writing speed. The PCIE SATA card is just too bottle-necked on the 2.0. I removed it and went back to the sata 2.0 on motherboard. Read/write speeds around 230 - 240. That's the best it will be.

After my results, I would only recommend this card if someone needed to add more sata ports. Or maybe on a motherboard that only has sata 1.0.
 
The RX 580 Graphic Cards, 2048SP is now $94.99. ($5 cheaper than what I paid) This is not a power horse but working well for my needs and the price. It supposedly repurposes memory from used mining cards. Several youtube videos about similar Chinese cards. This particular card has 8gigs of memory. Some only have 4gigs.Here's the link in case anyone else wants to upgrade an old PC:

Code: 
https://www.newegg.com/p/27N-008E-00014?Item=9SIB601JHC2397
 
As I see the gaming graphics card market is going through a rough time. Tons of failures and vendors are not honoring warranties. Some of those suckers are $$$$.
Perhaps manufacturers are giving you the ability to overclock them grossly and unlike a processor which shuts down or slows down when hitting its maximum temperature.
Their attitude is sort of "Let it cook". Kind of reminds me of the Hemi Exclusion sticker in the glovebox of old Mopars. Off the lot, it's your baby.
Or the classic Georgia warranty. I'll guarantee you bought it and here's the receipt.
 
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