What max wattage does an Nvidia 6800 (non GT or Ultra) draw?

[dparson]

Hi all,

I'm wanting to upgrade the video card in my Shuttle XPC SS51G (with 200W power supply) and play Doom 3 in all its glory, but am not sure what kind of power the little computer can provide for the video card. Does anyone know what maximum wattage the Nvidia 6800 (non GT or Ultra) video card will draw? I'm planning to add up the draws of the P4 2.0GHz processor and two IDE hard drives the system has, and see how much is left over for the motherboard and any future video card.

Note to ATI & Nvidia: an AC adapter which plugs into the video card externally would allow you to sell more video cards.

Thanks everyone.

 

[vshah]

the psu in your shuttle is pretty high quality. you should be just fine.

-Vivan

 

[dparson]

Thank you Vivan. I've ordered an eVGA 6800 and will post the results here. If it doesn't work out, I saw that Newegg sells a stronger 250W power supply, so that's a nice option.

Thanks again.

 

[Genx87]

You are going to be pushing it with a 200Watt PS. I wouldnt go with anything less than a high quality 300Watt but prefer a 350Watt.

External power connectors will cause a problem because you are now adding two circuits where you had a single one before.

 

[dparson]

Genx87 - Good call on the external power connector suggestion, I guess they already thought of and dismissed that idea

This weekend I installed the vanilla Nvidia 6800 into the Shuttle SS51G with its 200W power supply, and it worked like a charm. I never experienced any lockups or stability problems, and all went well. The system includes a P4 1.8A overclocked to 2.1GHz, 768MB of RAM, two IDE hard drives, and a DVD writer. The hard drives and DVD writer were powered from one of the power cables coming from the power supply, while the video card was given the second power cable.

The system plays Doom 3 very well, and after testing different graphical settings, I settled on 1024x768 with quality set to "Medium", no AA, 8xAF (set using a console command), and image caching turned on and optimized for the system (also set with console commands). The "timedemo demo1" frame rate using these settings was 35fps on the first run, and 38fps on the second run. While walking around the first level of the game, the frame rate was mostly at Doom 3's max of 60fps, but in certain more complex areas with a deeper field of view, the frame rate would drop to the low 20's and sometimes upper teens.

Just for the heck of it, I ordered a P4 2.8A processor and Shuttle 250W power supply to experiment with. I'll see if the 200W power supply can power the 2.8GHz CPU, and if so how high it will overclock. I'll compare this with the 250W power supply and see what performance can be had. Hopefully next weekend I can test all this stuff out.