6800 unlocked to 6800Ultra on 250 watt PSU?

[thecoolnessrune]

I have a Dell Dimension 4550. Its powersupply is 250watts. Its running a 2.533Ghz Pentium 4 533FSB, a CD buner, and a 120GB Seagate Harddrive. My question is can a 6800 non-Ultra non-GT that is unlocked (not overclocked) to an Ultra run on such a small power supply???

Secondly what about my other rig? Its running a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 800FSB, a DVD burner, a 160 Western Digital harddrive, and a 30GB Seagate harddrive. Iy has a 350watt PSU.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

nvm doesn't matter. Just found out no 6800 can run on an AGP 4x bus

 

[Grimbor]

Though the OP won't be attempting this because of the AGP issue, I thought it might be of use to someone out there to know what some friends of mine tried in their computer shop. Just playing around, they were building various systems to play around with, installing mismatched BIOS versions and generally just doing silly things since a lot of what they could mess up came out as cost free.

One thing that was interesting was that they built a few high end machines running 6800 ultras in SLI using cheap 230 watt PSUs and they ran stable. Wouldn't recommend it on a real system, but I think the minimum requirements many manufacturers claim, such as the high 12V requirements on the 7800 are mainly to cover any possible liabilities and going well below stated specs is possible but risky.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

lol....... thats all I have to say.

 

[hans030390]

give us specs on your power supplies...we really need the amps on the 12V rail

are you sure 6800's wont run in 4x agp? i thought they did

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: hans030390
are you sure 6800's wont run in 4x agp? i thought they did

They will.

 

[2Xtreme21]

They will run in 4x. And you can't clock a 6800 to ultra speeds. It's DDR memory and you'd have to pull it up 300MHz in order to get it even to GT stock speeds.

 

[happy medium]

I't will run with the pipes unlocked and overclocked. A 4550 will run a 6800 GT on a 250 watt power supply.

edit: It will run a x800xt also

 

[Avalon]

My old eVGA 6800 ran great in my system, but when I tossed it into my brother's system with an AXP 2100+ and some VIA K400ish (AGP 4x) board, it would run but all games would display artifacting and advanced textures + effects would not display. When I tossed it back into my system, all was fine, and the new happy owner of the card hasn't been having any issues either. My bro had a 350w Antec, btw.

 

[Rock Hydra]

Originally posted by: Avalon
My old eVGA 6800 ran great in my system, but when I tossed it into my brother's system with an AXP 2100+ and some VIA K400ish (AGP 4x) board, it would run but all games would display artifacting and advanced textures + effects would not display. When I tossed it back into my system, all was fine, and the new happy owner of the card hasn't been having any issues either. My bro had a 350w Antec, btw.

I found a lot of the VIA K7 chipsets to be buggy with the newer hardware. My friends don't have a lot, so they use boards with VIA chipsets. They had no POST issues and decreased performance issues depending from person to person.

 

[richardrds]

I don't think you have any chance of a stable system with the 250W PS.

The 350W is boarder line minimum and may work, but i would question stability unless thoroughly tested.

Personally i would not try it with anything less then a 400W PS rated at least 18Amps on the +12 rail.

 

[BobDaMenkey]

It could work, but it'd probably be a bad idea to try it.

The second system would be better, but border line.

4x and 8x are backwards compatable. Why does everyone think they are not??? I remember back when 8x just came out everyone bought them and stuck them in their older 4x boards.

 

[imported_humey]

Ive ran 8x cards in 4x mobos and vice versa, it works fully and makes no diff to your cards clocks (there will be some buggy mobos probably out there)

You can never ever make a 6800 into a 6800U, it dont even same RAM or have 2 molexs and a 250watt psu wont run a ultra even a branded psu, it will either warn you about lack of power or burn out PSU very soon.

To run a 250watt psu today tells me either its old basic rig that dont need a modern gpu or your mad and build a modern rig but skimped on psu and probably ram like most peeps do> they spend fortune on top cpu/mobos/gpu and wont buy good ram and most important part of rig the > PSU.