Bkpizza

Hi everyone, I was just wanting some advice on how to measure voltage on my 8600GT, I know how to mod it and have, but at idle my multimter shows 1.45v but under load it jumps to 1.54v. Does anyone know which one to go on? Thanks

Ionimplant

Where are you making the measurement (both terminals of the DVM)?

Bkpizza

Yeah i place the positive on the terminal and the negative on ground, 1 terminal always reads about 0.01 volts higher, one terminal says 1.444 while the other says 1.453 (under idle). Am i doing something wrong? Thanks

meticadpa

That's a lot of volts, are temps fine?

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Bkpizza

Temps are ok, in 22C room temps under full load it hits about 65C. But under load the voltage measures 1.54v, and thats what is confusing me.

Aaron_Henderson

I might be crazy, but I pencil modded mine way back without measuring voltage at all. Just be very careful. I would go by the maximum voltage, which in your case is load voltage.

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Screw what you know, you were lied to

Bkpizza

Alright thanks, i remember reading that thread too. I was only wondering because some people were saying in other threads to pump it up to 1.6v, and I was not sure if that was at idle or load, because its a huge difference.

Ionimplant

What is ground?

You must be very careful about what you "think" is ground. The only way to really measure the voltage you are interested in is to measure across the ground pin and output pin of the voltage regulator. If you use a ground reference that is at some random place on the motherboard or on the case or anywhere else, you will be fooling yourself.

The measurements you gave indicated a 0.09 volt variation. Unlikely the chip being supplied will like this kind of variation. Therefore, there is something wrong with the measurement.

What is happening is simply that between your "load" and "no-load" condition, current is flowing in your ground path that is perturbing your measurement.

An interesting experiment for you to perform is to leave your DVM ground where it is and then measure the ground of the regulator in load and no-load conditions. You should see a delta of 0.09 volts as indicated by your earlier measurements.

Bkpizza

So where can i find these pins? I really am no expert on electronics, do you need pictures of my card at all? I was using the ground of the molex connectors from the psu. Another question which is pretty stupid, what does DVM stand for? Is it Digital Volt Meter?
Thanks for all your help

Large picture here http://www.3dnews.ru/_imgdata/img/2007/05/08/47937.jpg

edit: is this the ground i should use? http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/4...m2114dsih5.jpg the one called gnd obviously?

Bkpizza

OK you can close this thread now, I was measuring the voltage and the terminal slipped, shorting the card which is now dead, I am now running an old S3 Trio 64V PCI card and eagerly hoping to get a HD4670 which i shall not modify or go anywhere near with a multimiter thanks for your help anyway.