Just wondering

[Kharohz]

I have a HTPC with a http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16811163081

case and psu.

I am wondering if this would have enough power to handle a (939) Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2gb of ram, 1 SATA 250GB harddrive and *drumroll* a 3750 Radeon.

No plans to have a optical drive nor a soundcard.

What do you think?

 

[mpilchfamily]

You realize how slim that case is right? You'll be lucky to get the card in there. That case is designed to use a motherboard with onboard video or a low end video card. The PSU is 120W and not likely to support much of anything other then the motherboard, 1 HDD, DVD rom, and thats about it. And you'll have to use a laptop DVD rom and possibly a laptop HDD.

 

[Kharohz]

Holy crap, everyone must think me as an idiot.

I will not edit the first post due to the pure hilarious concept of that case I linked actually working with a video card.

Here is the real case, don't know what happened with my mad Ctrl-C abilities.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16811163046

Sorry about that.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Thats better. LOL

Don't know what the specs are for the PSU and i also don't know what the power needs of the 3750 are. Or do you mean the 3850 since i haven't heard of any 3750 being released by ATI. But the 3850 requires a PCI-e power connector which that PSU doesn't have. Chances are that PSU wouldn't be able to power the configuration you are looking to get. If you really want this to be an HTPC they you might want to consider a lower power card such as the 8400 or 8500. These are great cards for an HTPC but they are not good at gaming. But then if your building this to be an HTPC it really shouldn't be meant for gaming.

 

[Kharohz]

Wow, I keep pulling stuff out of the hat, what the hell is a 3750? Anywho, thanks for the reply. So I probally should stick with something that doesn't require a PCI-e power connector.

Sad too, because the 3850, draws not so much power, and is quiet and cool from what I hear.

According to the power supply calculator (or whatever) my system with that setup shouldn't use more than 200W

 

[mpilchfamily]

It all depends on the PSU your able to get. Unfortunatly mATX PSUs don't have very strong 12V rail(s). But the power needs of the 3850 will probably be outside the range of any mATX PSU you can find. You may want to find a HTPC case that can hold a full sized ATX PSU.

 

[Lunyone]

Here's Sapphire's recommendations for a 3850 or a 3870, but doesn't reveal much
System Requirement:

PCI Express based PC is required with one X16 lane graphic slot available on the motherboard.
1GB or greater system memory for better performance.
450Watt or greater power supply with 75 Watt 6-pin PCI Express power connector recommended.
For ATI CrossfireX: 550 watt power supply or greater with two 6-pin connectors.
Certified power supplies are recommended. Refer to http://ati.amd.com/certifiedPSU for a list of Certified products
Installation software requires CD-ROM drive.
DVD playback requires DVD driver
Blu-ray/HD DVD playback requires Blu-ray/HD-DVD drive and playback software.
For a complete ATI CrossFireX? system, a second ATI Radeon? HD 3850 graphics card, an ATI CrossFireX Ready motherboard and one ATI CrossFireX Bridge Interconnect cable per board are required.

If you look at the link below, it shows that the 3850 consumes about 5w less than a 8600gts. So there isn't too much power needed, about 181w for the TOTAL system (which was measured at the wall).
http://techreport.com/articles.x/13603/9

And this too:
Power consumption
It's time to do some actual testing with these cards. We'll start off by showing you some tests we have done on overall power consumption of the PC. Power consumption is a big thing, and I'm thrilled to see what AMD has achieved here.

Looking at it from a performance versus wattage point of view, the power consumption is really good with the new 55nm products. Our test system is a Core 2 Duo X6800 Extreme Processor, the nForce 680i SLI mainboard, a passive water-cooling solution on the CPU, 2GB memory, DVD-ROM and WD Raptor drive. Have a look:

Videocard
System Under load

8800 Ultra
371 Watt

HD 2900 XT
391 Watt

HD 3870 286 Watt
HD 3850 246 Watt

Observe closely the difference between the 2900 and the 3870. Shocking as performance is nearly equal while wattage dropped over a 100 Watts. A big thumbs up to AMD here, that's just brilliant.

The methodology is simple: we look at the peak wattage during our benchmark session to verify power consumption. It's a good load test as both GPU and CPU are utilized really hard here. Please do understand that you are not looking at the power consumption of the graphics card, but the consumption of the entire PC.

In my view the Radeon HD 38xx series require you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit at minimum if you use it in a high-end system, and I think that's barely on the safe side. Also recommended is 28 AMP's on the 12 volts rails for stable power distribution (on a single card configuration)
http://guru3d.com/article/Videocards/472/8/

You can check them out and see what you think.