Antec Quattro 850W Power Supply Problem

Some of you may remember the Antec Quattro 850W review Anthony wrote at the end of October. it was a great power supply for given it’s price and features. As a matter of fact, it was so well like that Overclockers Online gave it the Editor’s Choice Award.

Did we speak too early?

I met up with Anthony at the end of 2007 to pick up the power supply from him as I was building a new machine. The system consists of an Asus P5E3 motherboard, Intel Q6600 G0 Stepping processor, Patriot Memory 2GB DDR3-1333 memory modules, my new BFG 8800GT OC2 video card, an Antec 900 case, a Thermalright HR-01 CPU Cooler, a few hard drives, a Lite-ON 20X DVD+/-RW drive, and my Logitech diNovo Media Desktop. This isn’t exactly a power hungry machine and I would have surely thought the 850W power supply by Antec would be more than sufficient, however, I was wrong. After installing Windows XP SP2 and the nVidia drivers, I was immediately greeted with a Sentinel warning from nTunes saying my card was not getting sufficient power. How could this be? A quick search on google and I found out I wasn’t the only one with the problem. It’s common among Antec users, and some other manufacturers.

I contact Antec via online support and was quickly an update on the situation. Here’s what they have to say:

Simon,
We originally noticed this problem with the 8800GTX video cards. Nvidia tested our power supply with the cards to certify them for SLI testing and they passed with flying colors. We sent out a fix when we saw there was a problem, the fix worked and now we are noticing that the GTS and GT cards are not working with this new revision. We currently do not have a working version of the power supply that will work with the Nvidia 8800GT and GTS cards. We have recently found that this problem is also with other brand PSU’s and Nvidia video cards. Our engineers are working with Nvidia on a fix for this issue.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
XXXX XXXX
Antec Customer Support

Antec definitely hasn’t lost me as a customer but I’ll be waiting for when this issue gets resolve so I can get an RMA! Until then, my Cooler Master 500W iGreen from July of 2006 is running my system.

Tags: Antec, Power Supply, Quattro