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Video Card Selection Help


Commissar

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My BFG 6800GT is overclocked by the manufacturer also. Its underwarranty so you can always return it as long as its still underwarranty.

 

If you are really wary check the temp of the CORE cpu for your Graphic card and if its hotter then 60C return it.

Now, honestly...do I sound like the kind of guy who'd know how to do that?

Its easy, you can check the temp in windows with the software Nvidia gives you. Go to the Icon tray, click it, go to Display and then your monitor, then Temperature, Voila! mine is at a temp of 51C right now. overclocked of course.

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As long as your not using a small formfactor case the size of a toaster you should be fine. By the way how many watts is your power supply?

Haven't the foggiest.

 

Rip the side off your computer and tell me instantly I demand it it's a matter of life and death!

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Well make sure its atleast 350watts. Considering you have a computer that supports PCI Express you most likely do have somewhere around 400 watts, most likely 450 watts

 

I'm pretty certain that the top end geforces need 400 Watts.

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Commissar, if you're going to be plugging in a 7800 or X1800 class card into your machine, simply the peak "wattage" of your Power Supply is not going to give you an indication of whether it can handle your card. A lot of el-cheapo power supplies have massive peak wattages (500W) but are extremely crappy since they cannot supply adequate current (amperage) on their 12V rails.

 

When you open up your box, apart from the peak power rating, also take a look at how many Amps it gives on the +12V rail. There should be a table of sorts on the PSU giving the amperage of the different rails. Look for a row or column that says something like +12 : 18A. This means your PSU can output 18 amps on the +12V rail. In order to run a 7800GTX or X1800XT or even an X850XT class graphics card, you want at least 24-26 amps on the +12V. Some modern PSU's have "dual" 12V rails, with, for example, 18A on each rail (for a total of 36A), and these should also be good.

 

To give you an idea of how important this rating is, consider this: you can probably buy a 500W PSU for $20 that puts out 10A on the 12V rail. I don't think you'll even be able to successfully boot your machine with this, if you're using one of these high-power cards.

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Okay, I cracked open my case, and I've only got a 350 watt PSU. Yikes. I also checked the amps at twelve volts, and I believe I have dual rails, since my table says, "+12V-A ====/ 18A +12V-B ====/ 18A." Am I good to go with this thing or not?

Edited by Commissar
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Another great thing about this card is its power requirements. A 350-Watt power supply is recommended and the total draw of the card is around 75-80 Watts, so it is very power friendly relatively speaking. There is 256MB of GDDR3 standard operating on a 256-bit memory bus. The total bandwidth is 32 GB/sec versus 38.4 GB/sec on the GeForce 7800 GTX.

 

This is what HardOCP.com said about this card.

 

I say get the card, if it doesn't work in your system, return or get a new power supply, which ever is more convinient. I would go for the latter personally since your machine has good specs and you would need to in the future anyway if you want a card later on.

Edited by WITHTEETH

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You'll also want to make sure that your power supply has enough juice to power the Verto. Single-card users will need a 350-watt supply; if you plan to run two cards in SLI mode, you'll need 450 watts. That's more than comes standard in most desktops (although those are the standard power requirement ratings for all GeForce 7800 GTs), so you may need to consider upgrading your power supply as well.
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Okay, I cracked open my case, and I've only got a 350 watt PSU.  Yikes.  I also checked the amps at twelve volts, and I believe I have dual rails, since my table says, "+12V-A ====/ 18A  +12V-B ====/ 18A."  Am I good to go with this thing or not?

That, my friend, looks like one *beautiful* power supply unit. In which case, it is also quite likely that the manufacturers have actually been conservative with the wattage rating. You should be fine.

 

And congratulations on your new card. IMHO, it is the best you can buy today at that price range.

Edited by angshuman
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Okay, I cracked open my case, and I've only got a 350 watt PSU.  Yikes.  I also checked the amps at twelve volts, and I believe I have dual rails, since my table says, "+12V-A ====/ 18A  +12V-B ====/ 18A."  Am I good to go with this thing or not?

That, my friend, looks like one *beautiful* power supply unit. In which case, it is also quite likely that the manufacturers have actually been conservative with the wattage rating. You should be fine.

 

And congratulations on your new card. IMHO, it is the best you can buy today at that price range.

Thanks. And thanks for the help. Glad you mentioned the possibility of dual rails, too, because the little sticker with the table on it is rather awkwardly placed, and it took me several looks to see the +12V-B listing, which I started praying for as soon as I only saw 18A for 12V-A. If I hadn't known about that, I would've given up in despair. >_<

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