How can I find the power consumption spec of a video card?

[Ken90630]

So I'm looking to replace a dead video card on a friend's Sony VAIO PC. It's PCI-E, and the PSU is a 305W Hipro (brand) with 18A on the 12V rail.

When looking at cards on Newegg, I occasionally but rarely see the power requirements of the PCI-E cards. Maybe one out of five or ten will list it in the specs. And finding them on the card mfgr's Website is hit & miss (mostly miss) and, of course, time consuming.

Short of calling Asus, Sapphire, EVGA, etc., and asking them to look up the PSU power requirement of a particular card, how can I know if a card I'm looking at will run on this PC with its relatively low-power PSU?

If it matters, there isn't much else on this PC drawing significant 12V power other than its P4 chip. There are no other cards installed, and there's only one HD.

 

[toyota]

what is wrong with your onboard video? I hope you are not looking for a video card to game on as anything capable of that would be a waste with a P4. also that psu is very cheaply made and will come no where near making its rated wattage after all these years.

 

[Ken90630]

what is wrong with your onboard video? I hope you are not looking for a video card to game on as anything capable of that would be a waste with a P4. also that psu is very cheaply made and will come no where near making its rated wattage after all these years.

Onboard video won't work because my friend wants to hook up her HP 23" LCD monitor that runs 1920x1200 native resolution. And the onboard video won't run that resolution. (This PC was built in 2005.)

EDIT: The above statement may not be accurate. See my subsequent post below.

No, no gaming. But she has this nice monitor and it's just sitting around unused. She'd like to start using it.

And yeah, I know the PSU is a cheapy. But since this an old machine, she doesn't want to put much money into it. I'm just trying to see if I can make it work again on the cheap.

 

[toyota]

the onboard cant run 1920x1200? wow even the 6 year old 6100 Nvidia onboard video can support that res. anyway, I would get a 5450 and they can be found for around 20 bucks after rebate.

 

[Concillian]

http://www.geeks3d.com/20090618/graphics-cards-thermal-design-power-tdp-database/

The low end AMD 6xxx series cards are rebadged 5xxx series cards, so TDP of a 6450 will be the same as the 5450.

If I unplug my HD5770 and use the built in GPU, my wall power decreases about 20 watts. So you can figure on needing around that. If she's not doing anything demanding, all GPUs will probably run around the same amount of power (~20 W) This not a lot of power and she should have margin for that.

 

[toyota]

http://www.geeks3d.com/20090618/graphics-cards-thermal-design-power-tdp-database/

The low end AMD 6xxx series cards are rebadged 5xxx series cards, so TDP of a 6450 will be the same as the 5450.

If I unplug my HD5770 and use the built in GPU, my wall power decreases about 20 watts. So you can figure on needing around that. If she's not doing anything demanding, all GPUs will probably run around the same amount of power (~20 W) This not a lot of power and she should have margin for that.

that is incorrect as the 6450 is not a rebadged 5450 at all. it also uses 17 more watts which in the OP's cases is a deal breaker. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6450-caicos-blu-ray-3d,2920-12.html

 

[Arkadrel]

I ll just 2nd things said in here.
The 5450 is a very power efficent little card.

The card alone (5450), not intire system only uses like:
idle ~5 watts
avg load ~12watts
maximum load~13watts


I think with if your PSU is rated 300watts though, you could get away with a little bit more powerfull card if you wanted too.



Here you see that a Intel 2500k + 5450 use about:

118 watts during full load (most of that power use, comes from the CPU).

We reverted to FurMark for our power load reading, as our usual choice, 3DMark 11, does not work with the GeForce GT 220. As such, these values are much higher than a user would see during game play.

^ furmark, with the power protection features off, is a power hog.

Even if you did the most demanding "normal" gameing, you could on these cards, they probably wouldnt even end up useing that much power.



Do you want to be able to game on your pc?

 

[MrTeal]

Tom's Hardware setup consumes 135W at the wall running Furmark with the 6450 and an 2500k@4GHz. The Pentium 4 is a power hungry chip, but unless she's running a lot of HDDs or something else I think it's a little pessimistic to say that a 305W HiPro won't run that, especially if she's not gaming.

 

[gevorg]

The official TDP numbers can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units

I would still checkout the reviews for Kill-a-Watt measurements, etc.

 

[Arkadrel]

Tom's Hardware setup consumes 135W at the wall running Furmark with the 6450 and an 2500k@4GHz. The Pentium 4 is a power hungry chip, but unless she's running a lot of HDDs or something else I think it's a little pessimistic to say that a 305W HiPro won't run that, especially if she's not gaming.

^ what he said.

the 5450 useing like 5watts idle, 13wats max, is like nothing.

He could probably get away with putting something like a 5750 in it if he really wanted to, and wanted to do some light gameing on it.


Even if that P4 uses like 160watts or something, add in motherboard/ram/HDD, he can probably still squeeze in something like a 100watt TPD GPU in there.



I was thinking of this card:

PowerColor HD 5750 Go! Green

it uses around:
idle = 14watts
avg = 45watts
max = 62watts <--- awesum.

Link here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131449


Pros: Completely quiet. Does not require an external power connection to operate.

fanless card, so it wont make any noise at all.

Why should you get a 5750 like this one above? and not the 5450,...
because this card is litterly 5 times as fast, so you can do some gameing on your pc, if you want to.

 

[toyota]

remember again folks that this is a VERY cheap 5 year old hi-pro psu. many of those units don't make it past 5 or 6 years even powering the system without a video card. he should get the lowest power card he can since all he needs is output for a monitor. I still would like to know what onboard video the OP is talking about though too.

 

[Arkadrel]

@Toyota,

Your right... he mentions no gameing <.< in his 2nd post in thread... overlooked that.

Your right, that would make the best card for it, the smallest useing card he can get.
Ei a 6450 or something.

 

[Concillian]

17 more watts which in the OP's cases is a deal breaker. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-hd-6450-caicos-blu-ray-3d,2920-12.html

17 more watts in Furmark... which I'm willing to bet she doesn't have a clue what that is.

in her usage, all cards will use very close to the same amount of power... which is near enough zero to get whatever is cheap. Any card you buy will basically underclock and undervolt itself in any load a non-gaming Pentium 4 will see. Reviews showing load power are useless, idle power is where it will be the whole time.

 

[taltamir]

Tom's Hardware setup consumes 135W at the wall running Furmark with the 6450 and an 2500k@4GHz. The Pentium 4 is a power hungry chip, but unless she's running a lot of HDDs or something else I think it's a little pessimistic to say that a 305W HiPro won't run that, especially if she's not gaming.

1. 305W is most likely (claimed) peak wattage not sustained wattage.
2. Cheap PSU makers LIE, a lot.

Realistically your peak power (going above that number will cause it to blow up, literally) on a cheap PSU is ~1/2 to 2/3 the stated rating. And actual sustained power is much less than that.
Add to it the fact that it is 6 years old and it is entirely plausible for it to be overloaded...

that being said, if it is overloaded you can just replace it for fairly little money with a quality PSU. Just come back and ask us (antec earthwatts is the best balance of cost and quality I think)

Also, a HDD consumes ~2 watt on idle and 5 watts while writing data. IIRC reading is closer to the 2 watt figure.

 

[toyota]

17 more watts in Furmark... which I'm willing to bet she doesn't have a clue what that is.

in her usage, all cards will use very close to the same amount of power... which is near enough zero to get whatever is cheap. Any card you buy will basically underclock and undervolt itself in any load a non-gaming Pentium 4 will see. Reviews showing load power are useless, idle power is where it will be the whole time.

you were the one that called it a rebadge and said it used the same power. your were incorrect because a 6450 is an all new faster card that does use more power. the OP needs nothing more than a 5450 no matter how you look at it though.

 

[Ken90630]

the onboard cant run 1920x1200? wow even the 6 year old 6100 Nvidia onboard video can support that res. anyway, I would get a 5450 and they can be found for around 20 bucks after rebate.

Ah, well I'm not sure what to think here. I had it in my mind that integrated graphics around that time (2005ish) were maxing out lower than 1920X1200. But this Sony VAIO has an Intel 915G chipset, and after spending almost a half hour tracking down the specs, it appears it can in fact go beyond 1920X1200. The only thing that's confusing, however, is that 1920X1200 isn't listed as one of its resolutions -- the closest one is 1920X1440. And the one below that is 1600X1200. So it would appear that running her monitor in its native res of 1920X1200 won't be possible.

Regardless, this VAIO only has 512MB of RAM in it, and if she tries to run that large HD monitor on integrated graphics, I assume it would suck a lot of system RAM to do it (in the absence of dedicated RAM on a separate video card). So even if the integrated graphics would do 1920X1200 -- only over VGA, not DVI incidentally, 'cuz there is no DVI connector -- that's really not an ideal way to go. Plus, the integrated graphics aren't HDCP compliant, so that's a potential issue with this monitor also.

And before you say, "add some RAM," that would cost as much (or more) as adding a $30-$40 video card, so it would be moot.

Thanks for your feedback though.

 

[Ken90630]

Thanks, everyone, for the replies and info. Very helpful.

Since I have a very good PC Power & Cooling 310-watt PSU lying around that still works perfectly, I'm going to give it to my friend as a replacement for the cheapy Hipro. So that solves the issue of the questionable PSU moving forward.

And I like the idea of a Radeon 5450 card -- something like this maybe?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814131338

Looks good to me.

Incidentally, I've never bought a PowerColor brand card before. Anyone have any opinions on them, good or bad?