GRAPHICS CARD ADVICE

[Ian]

Fkn cross-posted original makes me inadvertantly reply cross-posted, which
I *hate*

Sorry.


---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 0618-1, 03/05/2006
Tested on: 03/05/2006 22:13:06
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2005 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

 

[quarky42]

Seems like a pretty straight forward calculation:

Take Power Supply Wattage and subtract component powers:
250
-110 (4800 CPU)
-10 (Western Digital HDD)
-32 (My particular DVD Drive)
---------
98 Watts.

That leaves 98 watts for your video card to consume. One benchmark
I've seen says the 9700 GT uses 48 watts under 3D load and the 9700
GTX uses 84 watts under 3D load.

If that is the case you can have your CPU, Harddrive, DVD drive, and
Video card all running balls to the wall, and still have 10-12 watts
before you reach the max wattage. Since I copy all my games to my
harddrive from the DVD, I will have an extra 32 watt buffer on top of
the 14 watt difference.

If you are really worried about wattage, get the PC50 300Watt Silent X
Power Supply. I think it is overkill, but that is for my setup...
maybe your setup pulls more power? Find out for yourself by
searching Google.

Ya my method isn't 100% exact, however after seeing the Shuttle
compatible video card list for the SN21G5, I'm pretty durn close.
There are cards on there that use a little more than the 7900 GTX.
My method doesn't take into account the power your Mobo/Memory use
(definately not 46 watts though). On the other hand a good power
supply that is rated at 250 watts can handle a little bit more than
what it is rated for if you are comfortable with it.

I'd rather play my games from harddrive anyway. I don't give a flying
$hit what media the game vendors think I should be playing my games
on. I hate level load times and will always find the
"patches" required to play the game the way I want to play
it. I've even gone so far as to put disc images on a fast external
drive (still a lot faster than DVD random access times)

 

[quarky42]

I don't see how a graphics card manufacturer can know what size power
supply is required.... The higher the wattage of the power supply,
the more power connectors you'll usually have for drives and devices.
I could see a theoretical situation where high end sound card, dvd
drive, harddrives (especially in a large raid array), and a bunch of
other components could come close to the limit of the power supply by
the time you factor in a video card that sucks down 84 or more watts
of power by itself. (especially if you are running SLI)

What they need to do is educate people on how to estimate power
consumption of their devices, add that up, and see if their current
power supply is good enough.

A 250 watt power supply is enough if you aren't running too many
devices off of it.