Question Can I make a second PSU power my GPU?

[philosofool]

This is crazy stuff that I would never ordinarily do, however...

I teach at a university and we are now online due to COVID19. I need to prepare lecture videos for my students. HitFilm Express, my video editor, is GPU accelerated. My office computer has an i5 7500 but no standalone GPU. The result is a painfully slow video encoding experience. (BTW, I can't work from home because my wife does as a matter of course and uses that computer during the day.)

Now, I could add an older RX 270 to my office computer, but it's an Dell prebuilt that doesn't even have the power connectors, much less the power. So....

Can I bring in an old PSU from an old computer to power the RX 270, while the rest of the system works on the existing power supply? (The case for my Dell is ITX, my PSUs are ATX.)

 

[serpretetsky]

No it won't be pcie 6 pin. It should have a PSON cable (usually green) and PWR_OK (usually purple).

is this it?

Amazon.ca

edit: did you ever give us the dell model or motherboard model?

 

[Guru]

Just use encoding software with quicksync, EVERY INTEL CPU FROM THE 2000 SERIES HAS QUICKSYNC, that is over 10 years ago of cpu's that support quicksync, it is really fast and it uses intel's IGP.

 

[serpretetsky]

Just use encoding software with quicksync, EVERY INTEL CPU FROM THE 2000 SERIES HAS QUICKSYNC, that is over 10 years ago of cpu's that support quicksync, it is really fast and it uses intel's IGP.

You should probably address this first. (note: I haven't researched the software, so I dont know the details of it)

Hitfilm Express (his video editor) does not use either Quicksync or CUDA. It apparently isn't coded to use any type of proprietary encoding solutions. From what I can tell, it only uses OpenGL.

 

[Feld]

The board has the most ridiculous ATX system power connector I have ever seen. 6 pins? Is it possible that that is the same configuration as a 6-pin PCIe? If so, I could put the whole board on a different PSU. But I have no idea how to check whether the board ATX_SYS 6-pin is the same as a PCIe 6-pin and rule #1 here is don't fry your work computer. This is (I hope) a temporary situation or I would invest in a real solution.

If not, I can't find a riser that's compatible with the board, which has PCIE 4x and 16x but not 1x, which is what all the risers use. In any event, video rendering should be less power intensive and should run for shorter periods of time than mining, so hopefully it will be stable.

As long as the GPU doesn't need more bandwidth than PCIe 1x for adequate performance in your intended task, then a riser would still work. A PCIe 1x riser can absolutely be plugged in to a 4x or 16x slot and it will work just fine (just with 1x worth of bandwidth). You just plug it into the end of the slot closest to the edge of the motherboard (the IO panel edge). I actually wasn't aware that powered 16x to 16x risers aren't a thing, but I guess it makes sense since 1x is all the bandwidth miners need for their GPUs, and basically nobody else would typically have any interest in using multiple PSUs.

So if your work would be okay using only 1x bandwidth then one of those powered mining risers would work, otherwise your best bet is probably to look for an adapter like the one linked a few posts up so you can use a single, beefier PSU for the whole system.

 

[ondma]

Just use encoding software with quicksync, EVERY INTEL CPU FROM THE 2000 SERIES HAS QUICKSYNC, that is over 10 years ago of cpu's that support quicksync, it is really fast and it uses intel's IGP.

Yea, it would be nice for the OP to address this issue. Is there free encoding software that is available that uses Quicksync? Perhaps there are school regulations that require compatibility among the different departments, etc.

 

[philosofool]

Yea, it would be nice for the OP to address this issue. Is there free encoding software that is available that uses Quicksync? Perhaps there are school regulations that require compatibility among the different departments, etc.

I need to encode video from my editor which is not QuickSync accelerated. If I had known about this issue before, I might have researched QuickSync editors but that ship sailed.

 

[Steltek]

I need to encode video from my editor which is not QuickSync accelerated. If I had known about this issue before, I might have researched QuickSync editors but that ship sailed.

Yeah, it only utilizes the GPU via a form of OpenCL, which is how it uses the Intel iGPU.

It seems like since the school is mandating this that they should have provided you with some form of commercial software to do this with (and maybe even a computer to do it on). Its not like they probably don't have software contracts with several major software vendors (every University I've ever dealt with, other than the fraudulent diploma mills, seems to have them anyway at least for students and faculty).

 

[DeathReborn]

As long as the GPU doesn't need more bandwidth than PCIe 1x for adequate performance in your intended task, then a riser would still work. A PCIe 1x riser can absolutely be plugged in to a 4x or 16x slot and it will work just fine (just with 1x worth of bandwidth). You just plug it into the end of the slot closest to the edge of the motherboard (the IO panel edge). I actually wasn't aware that powered 16x to 16x risers aren't a thing, but I guess it makes sense since 1x is all the bandwidth miners need for their GPUs, and basically nobody else would typically have any interest in using multiple PSUs.

So if your work would be okay using only 1x bandwidth then one of those powered mining risers would work, otherwise your best bet is probably to look for an adapter like the one linked a few posts up so you can use a single, beefier PSU for the whole system.

Actually PCIe 3.0 x16 > x16 does exist, I just don't know if it's available in the states or not. It has a 4-pin Molex for power.

Kolink PCIe x16 on x16 Riser cable

Also, it appears the software he uses only uses the GPU for accellerating effects, if he's not using them or not many of them it will be of little to no improvement.

 

[Feld]

Actually PCIe 3.0 x16 > x16 does exist, I just don't know if it's available in the states or not. It has a 4-pin Molex for power.

Kolink PCIe x16 on x16 Riser cable

Also, it appears the software he uses only uses the GPU for accellerating effects, if he's not using them or not many of them it will be of little to no improvement.

Cool! I did a search on Newegg and Amazon and came up empty, so I'm guessing it could only be obtained as an import unfortunately.

 

[lightmanek]

This thread brings my memory back to times when I owned Two(!) Radeon HD2900XT and used them in CrossFire ... Suffice to say, my at a time 600W PSU worked surprisingly well, till I started overclocking. Once overclocked, during 3DMark my PC would shout off randomly ... not enough juice flowing to my GPU's

I simply added one old 250W ATX PSU to power just the 2nd card and problem was solved.
I ran multiple setups with 2xPSU's when mining on 4xR290X as my at a time 880W Hiper was not enough (obviously).

No issue running multiple PSU's, just to be on a safe side, it's a good idea to create common ground between all PSU's.

 

[philosofool]

Done. Thanks everyone for your thoughts and help. I got about an 800% improvement in my encode times and it's stable through a pass in Furmark.

(Please laugh at the photo and accept that it is what it is.)

 

[Headfoot]

Nice, I love a good jury rig

 

[Nnyan]

Your school's IT department is going to L O V E you doing this. And in some institutions doing something like this without approval is a firing offense. This is isn't your PC. Funny is that you are not the only one that is running into this My wife is a professor (so plenty of educators in our circle) and she just requested a second PC. Other teachers just decided to not do video editing, it's a bit of a crisis and no one is expecting perfection. There are options other then what you propose.