X800 power requirements?

[comcast]

I was wondering if anyone has read anything on the power requirements on the
upcoming x800. I 've seen some specs on it but they didn't mention power
requirements. I just read that the new nvidia requires 480 WATTS!

 

[John Lewis]

I was wondering if anyone has read anything on the power requirements on the
upcoming x800. I 've seen some specs on it but they didn't mention power
requirements. I just read that the new nvidia requires 480 WATTS!

Nope. You didn't read very far.

The suggested power supply for a complete PC (with highest-end
single-CPU ) and the 6800Ultra is 480 watts. That is to ensure that
enough current is available from the +12V rail (at least 18 amps)
for the sum-total of the 6800U, the CPU and the disk-peripherals.
Power-supplies of smaller capacity also generally have lower
12V max. current. A simple recommendation for non-technical
people.

The 6800U card is 110watts max (w/256Meg GDDR3 memory)
The GPU itself is ~ 90 watts max.

The current 5950U and 9800XT cards are around 93 watts max,
GPU ~ 65-70 watts max.

Just because the transistor count in NV40 is doubled over a
NV35 (also on a 0.13u process) does not mean doubled power.
A high percentage of the power is consumed by I/O
buffers, which power only changes with clock-rate. The
clock-rate of the NV40 is 400 Mhz, exactly the same
as a NV35. BTW, IBM builds the NV40 chip; less current
leakage than the (NV35) TSMC process AFAIK.


John Lewis

 

[NightSky 421]

I was wondering if anyone has read anything on the power requirements on the
upcoming x800. I 've seen some specs on it but they didn't mention power
requirements. I just read that the new nvidia requires 480 WATTS!

I think John offered a good explanation, but it's still safe to say that
you should really have a beefy and decent brand name power supply if you
want to venture into the upcoming video cards. I also think the 480W
recommendation was based on a person having a high-end system to begin
with, which I think would be the target audience of such cards in the
first place. Myself, I have a 2.8GHz processor, 1GB RAM, a sound card,
modem, 2 hard drives, 2 optical drives and a floppy drive in my case. I
also have a 9800 Pro video card. My tower case is a Lian-Li PC-60 which
has three case fans in it as well. My current power supply is an
Enermax 431W and I remember having some power problems at first when I
upgraded to my 2.8GHz CPU (along with a new motherboard and RAM) in the
fall of 2003. It turned out to be an oversight of sorts since I had
just about all of my high-drain devices hooked into the same lead. Once
I redistributed things around a little bit, all was fine again. Still,
it was a scare, and in my case, I would believe it if someone said to me
that I had to up my power supply for these new upcoming cards!

 

[Dark Avenger]

I was wondering if anyone has read anything on the power requirements on the
upcoming x800. I 've seen some specs on it but they didn't mention power
requirements. I just read that the new nvidia requires 480 WATTS!

It seems the card..once running in 3d mode might use about.. up to
120W... it has a dual connector for a reason

 

[comcast]

Thanks everyone for these responses. Very helpful.

 

[Dark Avenger]

I think John offered a good explanation, but it's still safe to say that

you should really have a beefy and decent brand name power supply if you
want to venture into the upcoming video cards.

*snip snip snip snip clrk... * ( grrrr... stupid thing is broken again
)
Still,

it was a scare, and in my case, I would believe it if someone said to me
that I had to up my power supply for these new upcoming cards!

True, it seems that it does matters how you distribute it over the
leads... HD"s and DVD/cd burners do best if kept away from
fans/neon/mods and powerhungry vidoecards.

So my HD and my DVD burner have their own little leads. And another
goes by my cpu
And one is left for my videocard plus fans

 

[NightSky 421]

True, it seems that it does matters how you distribute it over the
leads... HD"s and DVD/cd burners do best if kept away from
fans/neon/mods and powerhungry vidoecards.

So my HD and my DVD burner have their own little leads. And another
goes by my cpu
And one is left for my videocard plus fans

Yeah, and the problems I had were actually quite severe before I made
things right again. My hard drives would be clicking and powering up
and down while I was in any 3D application. They were quite loud about
it too. When I would exit a game and try to access any file on either
hard drive, the system would crash. I'm glad I got to the bottom of
things!

 

[John Lewis]

*snip snip snip snip clrk... * ( grrrr... stupid thing is broken again
)
Still,

True, it seems that it does matters how you distribute it over the
leads... HD"s and DVD/cd burners do best if kept away from
fans/neon/mods and powerhungry vidoecards.

Neons are VERY BAD NEWS in a PC. Any gas-discharge device radiates
lots of electromagnetic interference and reduces the noise immunity of
all the circuitry. So if you have neons (or fluorescents) and system
flakiness, turn off the neons and see if the problem goes away.

John Lewis