Best agp card that a 240 watt psu can handle?

[Xellos2099]

A friend of mine who is currently using an aging sn85g4v2 shuttlex system want me to help him slightly upgrade his system to made it last a little longer. He is not a serious gamer but feel like playing game such as C&C3 and upcoming call of Duty 4 and Starcraft 2. His current spec is:

Athlon xp 64 3000+
1 gig 3200 ddr ram
ati 9600xt AGP
160 gig hdd

I am thinking about upgrading the ram to 2 gig and upgrade the card to a maybe 7600gs or 7900gs. However, I am not sure if the card is going to fit in nor if the power supply can support it. If not, I have to set back to a old 6800gt serie. Can anyone here give me some pointer?

 

[Rage3kMoiz]

I'd be thinking about a 6200 but maybe even that would be pushing it, since it requires a 300W PSU. The 6800GT definitely wouldn't work though.

 

[biostud]

maybe 7600GT since shuttle normally uses good PSU's, but I'm not sure on that.

 

[Xellos2099]

Let see, my friend only got 1 dvd burner and 1 hdd in the casing so the rest of the power can be devoted to the like of 6800 or 7600gs. Anyone know what is the mininium voltage of power supplies that could run these.?

 

[RussianSensation]

GF7 was arguably the most efficient architecture in recent years.

7800GT PCIe - 57 watts at load! Although I must note that this measurement seems to be rather low. In addition, the AGP card of GF7 generation has to have a PCI Express-AGP bridge chip which consumes additional power.

I would look into 7600GT or 7800GS AGP cards, depending on how much you want to spend. However, it's fair to say this will be the last videocard upgrade for this system so if you are going to be spending $80 might as well spend $100 to get significantly greater performance. I did not bother to look for benchmarks of the 2 cards but I recall that 7600GT is slightly faster than X850XT PE which is close to the performance of 7800GS.

Theoretical analysis would give this:

7800GS OC - $115
pixel fillrate = 430 mhz x 8 pixel pipes = 3440 Mpixels
texture fillrate = 430 mhz x 16 texture units = 6880 Mtexels
memory bandwidth = 256 bit x 1300mhz / 8 / 1000 = 41.6GB/sec
vertex operations = 645 Mvertices/sec
ROPs = 8

vs.

7600GT OC - $110
pixel fillrate = 560mhz x 8 pixel pipes = 4480 Mpixels (+30%)
texture fillrate = 560mhz x 12 texture units = 6720 Mtexels (-2%)
memory bandwidth = 1400mhz x 128bit = 22.4GB/ sec
vertex operations = 700Mvertices/sec (per www.gpureview.com)
ROPs = 8

Due to inferior memory bandwidth you can expect 7800GS to outperform 7600GT with AA enabled (although it'll probably be slow with AA anyway). In other instances, the extra pixel fillrate should place 7600GT ahead in the benchmarks without AA/AF.

Also, 7600GT is made on 90nm process with 177 million transistors vs. 7800GS's 302 million transistors 110nm process, which means it should run even cooler and consume less power than the modest 193 Watts at load for a system comprising:

A64 X2 dual core 4800+ 2.4ghz
2GB of DDR1 ram
250GB hard drive
integrated soundcard

Although X1950 Pro AGP is only $99, it will most likely overwhelm the 240 Watt power supply

 

[Xellos2099]

I read report where some people managed to use a 6800gt single slot cooler version on the shuttle. So is it safe to assume that a 7600gs or gt agp version should work since its heatsink is pretty small and it actually use less power than a 6800gt?

 

[rubyrod]

In the Sudhian forums (originally dedicated to Shuttles), you will find post after post of people using extremely powerful cards with their Shuttle PSUs. That being said, I have a Shuttle SB75, P4HT 3.06 oc'd to 3.451, 250gb Samsung Spinpoint, 1gb Corsair CMX3200, DVDRW and an MSI 512MB 7600GT AGP oc'd to 600/900. This is on the Shuttle PC40 250w PSU without a hitch. A 6800gt has run in thousands of Shuttles. With modification to the case some people are even running dual slot Nvidia 8 series cards in the newer Shuttle models.

ruby

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: Rage3kMoiz
I'd be thinking about a 6200 but maybe even that would be pushing it, since it requires a 300W PSU.

And is also a performance downgrade from R9600XT in most benchmarks, not an upgrade. GF6200 falls somewhere between standard R9600 and R9600PRO, depending on the benchmark, assuming the GF6200 has 128-bit memory interface rather than the more common 64-bit.

For reference, R9600XT has a max. TDP of ~ 25W.