Recommend: Low current cards on an old power supply?

[jhsiao]

Hi,

I'm currently running off of an old 3dfx Banshee PCI card that I desperately want to upgrade.

Problem is, I got a pretty old system with only 14A available on the +3.3V rail on the power supply. So with my relatively low power CPU (Celeron 300A oc'ed to 450) on my Abit BH6, I'm not entirely sure how much 3.3V supply I have left to work with to source a new AGP video card.

I've been looking at the AGP Geforce 2 MX or GF2 MX400. The 1st generation AGP Geforce 256 and GF 256 DDR and even the TNT2 Ultras are out of the question as they draw massive current. The Geforce 3's and higher are probably also not viable.

Anyone know if there are any other AGP video cards that might have the same or lower current drain than the AGP GF2 MX's?

I suspect the Kyro's and Kyro IIs draw less because they seem to only need passive cooling, but does anyone know if say the GF2 GTS draws the same amount or more than the GF2 MX (been looking at the GTS-V that newegg's been sellin')?

Worst case, I can always grab a PCI card since I have plenty of power left in the +5V and +12V rails. With such a low power system, I doubt I'm losing anything going to PCI instead of AGP 2x since few cards actually use texture swapping to RAM.

Thanks.

 

[Peter]

Avoid NVidia. ATi cards have half the power consumption, Kyro is pretty economic too. If you want to play safe and are looking at GF2MX levels, use one of those fanless Radeon 7500LE cards, like PowerColor RV2LE, or an SiS 315 card. (The latter won't do good if you have OpenGL games though.)

regards, Peter

 

[vss1980]

In terms of low power, the Geforce2 MX cards do run pretty lean. Other cards that dont demand high currents are Kyro cards and ATI's Radeon VE / 7000 cards (although these are sub-GF2 MX speed). The SiS 315 should be a bit faster than the Radeon VE, but a bit slower than a GF2 MX400.

The ATI Radeon 7500 is a bit more power hungry, but will offer GF2 GTS/Pro performance but need less power than a GF2 GTS/Pro card would. It also offers better DVD performance, etc, which is helpful on older CPU's.

 

[Peter]

... that's why I said 7500LE. These consume little enough power to run fanless ...

 

[jhsiao]

After a bit of searching of old USENET articles, I found someone who claimed that the GF2 MX drew about 1.21A at 3.3V. And that the GTS drew about double that (presumably 2.42A at 3.3V).

Apparently, the AGP 1.0 specification that covers 1x and 2x said that the AGP slot has to provide a 2.0A maximum at 3.3V. The newer AGP 2.0 spec bumped that up to a whopping 6.0A at 3.3V.

Alot of the early motherboards were AGP 1.0 compliant, but since the original Geforce SDR and DDR took so much current, it was a good bet that they were out of compliance with the 1.0 spec. It seems like the only Geforce cards that fall within the 1.0 spec are the GF2 MX's (200, MX, and 400). All the others seem draw more than 2 amps so they'd have to be AGP 2.0.

It just seems well nigh impossible to find current draw information on the Geforce and Radeon cards since a GF2 MX400 will draw more than a vanilla MX (more RAM and higher clock). We're left with anectodal information about this card being cooler than that thus assuming lower current drain.

 

[vss1980]

Yeah Peter, I would agree, but with the LE you sometimes dont know what your getting in terms of clock speeds of core or memory. But that isn't my biggest concern with the 7500LE. Apparently there are rumours that a few super cheap ones destined for the Asian/OEM market use only 64-bit DDR (instead of the normal 128-bit DDR) memory - making it kinda like a pumped up Radeon 7200 (probably these are around to fill the gap left by the end of that line).

I doubt you will be able to find them, but as it should always be, 'buyer beware'.

 

[Peter]

Umm not quite ... the LE in the 7500LE, unlike the 8500LE, exactly means you get a 7500 with slower RAM. There have been cards with 128-bit SDRAM as well as with 64-bit DDR RAM. 64-bit DDR is popular on Low Profile form factor cards, exactly because you need half as many RAM chips, and also because having fewer RAM chips brings the power consumption down further. Of course the core clock is also reduced - see above, there is a tight power budget to squeeze ourselves into.

The big advantage over 7200 is that the 7500 chip has twin output pipelines, thus can run dual independent displays.

I have a PowerColor RV2LE here in my system (64-bit DDR, low profile, 230/200 clock), running dual head. PowerColor btw tells the memory configuration and core/RAM clocks on their web site. The PCI version is 250/200, and full height "SDRAM deition" AGP card is 230/170 (128-bit SDRAM).

regards, Peter