- Aug 25, 2001
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I built a F@H box last year, with an MSI K9A2 Platinum mobo (four x16 PCI-E slots), and currently have an EVGA single-slot 9600GSO, an EVGA Superclocked single-slot 9600GSO, and two PNY 768MB single-slot 9600GSOs. So four 9600GSO single-slot cards installed.
CPU is a dual-core AMD AM2 chip, something like a BE-2400 or BE-2350 or so. Currently has 4GB of RAM, but that's going down to 2GB soon, since with all the video cards, only 2.25GB is usable anyways under XP. One HD and SATA DVD burner.
All of this is powered off of the EA650, EarthWatts 650W PSU. Which, according to a review, has 300W of power just for the PCI-E connectors (25A @ 12V). Yet the PSU only has one 6-pin PCI-E (75W), and one 6+2-pin PCI-E (150W). All of the 9600GSO cards take a single 6-pin PCI-E, so I have two splitters on each of the cables, to fan out to four 6-pin PCI-E connectors.
Runs just fine under full load with F@H.
My question is this: Do I have enough power headroom to install four BFG 8800GT OC 512MB single-slot cards instead?
How much more power do the 8800GT cards take? Do they take more than 75W each? I don't want to do this if I have to upgrade the PSU, but if I can get away with it with my current PSU, it might not be a bad idea.
CPU is a dual-core AMD AM2 chip, something like a BE-2400 or BE-2350 or so. Currently has 4GB of RAM, but that's going down to 2GB soon, since with all the video cards, only 2.25GB is usable anyways under XP. One HD and SATA DVD burner.
All of this is powered off of the EA650, EarthWatts 650W PSU. Which, according to a review, has 300W of power just for the PCI-E connectors (25A @ 12V). Yet the PSU only has one 6-pin PCI-E (75W), and one 6+2-pin PCI-E (150W). All of the 9600GSO cards take a single 6-pin PCI-E, so I have two splitters on each of the cables, to fan out to four 6-pin PCI-E connectors.
Runs just fine under full load with F@H.
My question is this: Do I have enough power headroom to install four BFG 8800GT OC 512MB single-slot cards instead?
How much more power do the 8800GT cards take? Do they take more than 75W each? I don't want to do this if I have to upgrade the PSU, but if I can get away with it with my current PSU, it might not be a bad idea.
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