Low Profile AGP dual head cards

[SolMiester]

Hi all, I have a number of older SFF Lenovo PC's, which I now want provide dual monitor for. The trouble is finding cards that don't require extra power (Molex\PCIe connector etc).

I have found some HD5450 cards which should do the trick nicely, however am confused by the recommended PSU of 400w or greater...

These PC's only have small PSU's, 300w I think...The thing is, if there is no power plug on the cards, then the power is limited to the AGP slot is it not, and dont they max out at like 50-75w?

Help, the only alternative is USB to VGA adapters and they are a bit flaky with the units I have tested so far!

 

[SolMiester]

Eek, looks like the PSU are not even 300w, might only be 200w

 

[yottabit]

I would think the recommendations for the power supply are usually high to account for someone sticking that particular video card in a monster quad core system with 5 disk drives. It would help to get a list of the components in the system so you or I could estimate the power draw and figure out how much headroom you have.

I would think you should definitely be able to get a discrete GPU to provide dual monitor functionality. You aren't looking for a lot of 3D horsepower right? If that's the case I'd even look at PCI cards, or whatever is cheapest. I have a computer like that at work that has a PCI Geforce 6600 something in it, and it worked fine. As a generic recomendation, I think as long as you get a low end AGP or PCI card that doesn't require any extra power you would be all set. Especially if you won't be doing intense 3d applications or any stress testing like Furmark on it, the video card should never get anywhere near it's max power draw anyways.

 

[SolMiester]

I would think the recommendations for the power supply are usually high to account for someone sticking that particular video card in a monster quad core system with 5 disk drives. It would help to get a list of the components in the system so you or I could estimate the power draw and figure out how much headroom you have.

I would think you should definitely be able to get a discrete GPU to provide dual monitor functionality. You aren't looking for a lot of 3D horsepower right?

Hi mate, thanks for the reply, yes you are right, NO 3D required...Just went to ATi site and they too recommend 400w PSU, however check out the spec on these things and the power load

* Engine clock speed: 650 MHz
* Processing power (single precision): 104 GigaFLOPS
* Polygon throughput: 650M polygons/sec
* Data fetch rate (32-bit): 20.8 billion fetches/sec
* Texel fill rate (bilinear filtered): 5.2 Gigatexels/sec
* Pixel fill rate: 2.6 Gigapixels/sec
* Anti-aliased pixel fill rate: 10.4 Gigasamples/sec
* Memory clock speed: 400 MHz DDR2 and up to 800 MHz DDR3
* Memory data rate: 0.8 Gbps DDR2 and up to 1.6 Gbps DDR3
* Memory bandwidth: 6.4 GB/sec (DDR2) and up to 12.8 GB/sec (DDR3)
* Typical power: 19.1Watts
* Idle power: 6.4Watts


20w..seriously, I dont get it!

Oh, specs of PC's are P4 w\ HT, 1GB RAM, 1 HDD, 1 Optical!

 

[yottabit]

You should be fine adding a card like that to a system like that. that's almost identical to the system I used for work with the geforce card. I think it was a 6200 actually. Like I said the video card manufacturers are very conservative with their power supply requirements to prevent liability, for instance of someone trying to install the card in a system with a monster CPU and dozens of disk drives.

A system with those specs I would think would draw a max of 140 or 150 watts just off the top of my head, which should leave you the headroom you need for the card.

 

[SolMiester]

You should be fine adding a card like that to a system like that. that's almost identical to the system I used for work with the geforce card. I think it was a 6200 actually. Like I said the video card manufacturers are very conservative with their power supply requirements to prevent liability, for instance of someone trying to install the card in a system with a monster CPU and dozens of disk drives.

A system with those specs I would think would draw a max of 140 or 150 watts just off the top of my head, which should leave you the headroom you need for the card.

Hi, yeah, looking at the 6200 also....its just getting hold of these cards...very hard!

I have 1 coming down to test....got to be better than the USB adapters!

 

[gorobei]

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...256-DT&cat=VCD

dont know about the power requirements

 

[SolMiester]

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?inv...256-DT&cat=VCD

dont know about the power requirements

I'm in New Zealand bud, the freight on that would cost about the same again!..LOL

Waiting to see if I can source this here

http://pricespy.co.nz/product.php?p=414322