What power supply for a Radeon 9500 PRo?

[Total13]

I wanna ask to the owners of a Radeon 9500 Pro, how many watts has your power supply?. I have a 200W and I suppose that it is no sufficient. What do you recommend me?. Thanks for the answers.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Total13 on 01/16/03 03:02 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[ad_rach]

200w is definitely not sufficient.how many ide devices do you have?what is your spec?

no matter how hard you try, you can't polish a turd. :]

 

[chopshop]

I have a 250 watts PSU and I was curious about the same thing since I will be purchasing the same card. I called Gateway since thats where I bought my comp and asked them what was needed to run the card(9500). They said that my PSU was sufficient to run that card and not to worry. I was thinking they would try to push me with a new PSU like 300 watts or bigger, but didn't. Now I only have like DVD drive, CDRW and the basic other stuff so I am not worrying at all, but with 200 watts I am not sure if it will handle it or not. On ATI website, it says that a 300+ watts is recommened, but not required soooooo....... try it first and if u need more buy something bigger.

 

[dhlucke]

To get good results you should only be using 70% of the total wattage. So with a 200W powersupply, you should only use up 140W.

If a powersupply supplies 200W that means that it is divided between the different rails (12V,3.3V,5V). Depending on your powersupply, you might not have enough power on the needed rail.

For example, your videocard is using the +3.3V line and is pulling between 30W and 50W. Your motherboard uses the same line (along with the +5V) and pulls 25W-40W. Memory uses the same line and will pull 8W/128MB. Misc pci cards like a NIC or SCSI card will also pull juice.

So, you have 140W to blow and the 3.3V line needs at least half of it. The problem is that the processor is also going to need half of it. That pretty much leaves you with no more juice for hard drives, fans, floppy, cd-rom drives, etc.

You need AT LEAST 300W to run this card properly.

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<A HREF="http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?dhlucke" target="_new">Forum Assassin</A></font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

In my experience, Gateway's power supplies are much more conservatively rated than most retail units. Their 250W is probably as stong as an Antec 300 watt unit.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

 

[chuck232]

Also, same with Dell's. Their PSUs are extremely efficient or something. One guy had a Ti4600, DVD, CD-RW, 2 HDDs and other stuff running no prob. Had his card o/ced too... now the R9500 Pro may use more power than a Ti4600, but I'm not sure. It wasw just like nVidia saying to use a 300W PSU for the GF4 Ti cards.

...And all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put my computer back together again...

 

[Crashman]

Here's a little secret for you: retail power supplies are rated at peak wattage, many OEM power supplies are rated at continuous wattage. I've seen this first hand, I had a Gateway 200W ATX power supply running 4 hard drives, 4 fans, a highly overclocked video card, a PIII 700@933, a SCSI card, a TV card, a CD-Rom, a CD-RW, and whatever other little things (RAM, etc). I had an Antec 250W crap out. Then I tried another Antec, it crapped out too. And a Generic 300W crapped out as well.

How is it that so many HP systems can run on 150w power supplies when many have fast processors, huge drives, and are able to support decent video cards? Easy, the power supply is able to deliver 150w on a full time basis.

Why would OEM's use "better" quality power supplies in "cheaper" component systems? Well, that depends on your definition of the word "better". But if you were selling a million systems a year, you could specify pretty much anything you wanted. You would DEMAND power supplies that could last through the warranty. If you were given the choice of a high quality 150w unit or a cheap 250w unit, and the garrunty that the 150w unit was durable enough to last 3 years in the stock system, but was told that the 250w unit could power MORE devices, but only for 2 years, being the kind of company that sells extended warranties, you'd probably go for the smaller rating 150W supply.

<font color=blue>You're posting in a forum with class. It may be third class, but it's still class!</font color=blue>

 

[chuck232]

Ahhh... and Crash comes though with another very informational and clear post. GJ

<pre>Go Crashy Go!!</pre><p>...And all the King's horses and all the King's men couldn't put my computer back together again...

 

[CorpusBiscuit]

I'm running a 9500 Pro on a Compaq Presario with a 250w power supply. I've had the card since December 31 and its been running fine with the exeception of a few (2-3 times) graphical glitches which a reboot fixed.