Power consumption: Do port hubs drain more PC power?

[Dublex]

Hello everyone,

First of all, I've been away for a little while, distracted partly by the wonderful world of IT and Parliament and by other life issues.

But onto the point - this may sounds like a daft question, but do USB 2.0 8 port external hubs use up more power than USB 2.0 4 port hubs? the reason I ask is that my old rig has started to throw up atidag error when I reboot the machine, so I was wondering if the 8 port hub could be whats tipping the power consumption over the edge so that the PC can't initialise the GPU on reboot.

Of course, it could just be I need to move more devices out of the back of the main ports of my PC - or a failing power supply (although usually everything runs / initialises fine on power on).

Anyway, nice to post again, there are probably more new faces than when I went into hibernate mode.

 

[ming]

USB hubs require an external power source so it shouldn't draw any more than 5v from the USB port on the PC itself. I can't see any of your USB devices working if you don't have an external power source.

atidag error sounds more like a gpu bios/driver issue or something.

 

[Dublex]

Yes, I was wondering about the BIOS - is there any way to reset the GPU bios with a flash or something similar? (I've tried recycling the drivers several times, with drivercleaner to boot)

I knew that Mass Effect wasn't worth this much aggrivation.

Edit: (adding an edit as I don't post just to post) I've got it fully detected again, part of the problem could be that one of the chips is caked in dust which could be the ROM. I'll airdust it.

In any case its an old rig so I'm not going to go haywire if it suddenly fails.