Need more power with no power!

November 22, 2006 6:24 PM

What is the most powerful AGP video card I can use with a 200W power supply?

I have an old SFF PC laying around, and I'd like to pawn it off on a whiny friend who's into Warcraft and such.

Problem is, the power supply in that sucker is only 200 watts (true not peak). I have an old GeForce Ti4200 in there, and it's not cutting it. What can I stick in there?

posted by Willie0248 to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

There's no way to tell without knowing what else is in the box. The display card can use whatever is not being used by anything else that's in there.

But I would tend to think you're not going to be able to put any kind of state-of-the-art display card in there without upgrading that supply. 200W is pretty skinny these days. (And replacing the supply is really quite easy, and bigger ones don't cost that much.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:40 PM on November 22, 2006

i have an older shuttle xpc with a 250w power supply and I run a geforce 7600gs and an m-audio delta 44 soundcard out of it. i don't think the ps should give you as much trouble as the cpu would.
posted by rhizome at 7:58 PM on November 22, 2006

It does depend on what's in there, but you'd be surprised how much 200W is.

I've got a Athlon XP, 2 hard drives, TV Tuner, DVD burner and NVidia 6600GT in a 200W SSF Shuttle. Zero problems. I haven't tried to burn a cd while playing a 3D game, but I wasn't planning on doing that anyways.

Looking at a nice power usage roundup for video cards, I'd bet a NVidia 7600GT could easily replace the current card without getting too close to 200W. The card I have is 48W according to the roundup, while the 7600GT is 36W.

The SFFTech forums might be another place to ask if you have a configuration different than mine. (like a Pentium 4)
posted by easyasy3k at 7:58 PM on November 22, 2006

Well, as a gross rule of thumb, the more honking big the heatsink is on the thing, the more power it takes. So, fanless is your absolute best bet, if you're super worried. But a modest card with a fan will possibly be okay. Also, power consumption information should be available online; just see if the card you're thinking about takes more than your Ti4200, and if so, how much more.

You might be able to do a '6' level card (6600, 7600, X600, X1600), but probably not an '8' or '9'.

I _guess_ you could get a '2' level card, but I think you'd be disappointed; it probably wouldn't be a framerate improvement from your GeForce 4 (it might have better shaders and more texture RAM, though, so your visual quality would be higher.)
posted by blenderfish at 8:22 PM on November 22, 2006

A 6200 is significantly better than an old 4200, that's what I'd head for.
posted by krisjohn at 11:48 PM on November 22, 2006

hmm. Consulting the handy-dandy chart on Wikipedia:

Ti 4200 8x (NV28)
250Mhz core
513Mhz Memory
2000 MT/s fill rate
8.2 GB/sec Memory bandwidth

vs.

6200 AGP (NV44a)
350Mhz core
533Mhz memory
1400 MT/s fill rate
8.5 GB/sec Memory bandwidth

So, the 6200 gives you slightly higher core speed and slightly higher memory bandwidth, both of which will be more than eaten up by any fancy shaders you turn on. In, say, World of Warcraft, you'll probably have to do fewer rendering passes on the terrain, so, yeah, it will be a win. Also, there are going to be architectural fixups in the later generations which help with some bottlenecks. But if you're concerned about performance at all, I don't think you'll ever be happy with a '2' level card. (In fact, I'd say the card manufacturers' naming/marketing scheme is based, in part, on this fact.)
posted by blenderfish at 12:41 AM on November 23, 2006

The 6600GT is an excellent previous-gen choice, if you can't go 7xxx series, and they're cheap as chips now. I can throw any current-gen game at mine, and it's happy at 1280x1024, even, in most cases, with 2XAA on. I would avoid the 6200 like the plague.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 1:25 AM on November 23, 2006

blenderfish, I have a ti4600 and a 6200, and trust me when I say that the 6200 is significantly better than the 4600. The major benefit of the 6200s (and the 5200s before them) is that they are low power and thus passively cooled without a massive heatsink (and subsequent case fan).

Though, easyasy3k's chart looks handy. Basically, if power and/or heat is a problem you want, at least for nVidia cards, a high first digit, but a low second digit. (ie; 7600 is better than 6800.)
posted by krisjohn at 4:26 AM on November 23, 2006

I am running an AGP 6200 on a dell minidesktop with 180jigawats of power, so you should be able to with 200. It cost significantly less than stavrosthewonderchicken at newegg.
posted by billtron at 9:38 AM on November 25, 2006