Buying New Video Card

My 7600 does everything I need it to do.

Thanks Shirley, this explanation was awesome! I'm not very tech-savvie, so I'd like to ask, "what do you mean by slower clock?" To me, a clock is this round thing that hangs on the wall and has these stick things stuck to one face that spin around either too quickly or too slowly.

Some computer chips also have these round faced clocks inside them Old style with a pendulim swinging below it. Thay are very tiny so they can fit inside the chip. As the pendulim swings, the chip does it's work. Adding numbers and passing them on. So with every tick and tock of the clock, the chip has to have it's work ready for the next assignment of adding numbers and passing them on. A faster clock ticks and tocks faster so the chip has more work done in a shorter time. But if it goes TOO fast, then workers in the chip are rushed and can't complete the job and bad or no numbers come out

So in that case, wouldn't a slower clock mean that even if less stuff gets done, it has a better chance of being done correctly?

Stupid question alert:

Is there a way to find out what my current power supply is?

I probably should have left that out or finished the thought the first time.

When it comes from the factory the chip is set to how fast it can go and still be 100% reliable. Going slower deos not get any better than 100% reliable. You may here about people over-clocking their system. This is where you speed up the clock faster than factory settings and "hope" all the work is done correctly.

Open the case and look at it. There should be a sticker on the side of it. Even then it can be confusing finding the top rating but if your lucky it will look something like this one below.

Open up your case and take a look at the power supply. Its specs will be written somewhere on it. If it's from a friendly manufacturer, the label will be right on the side, where you can see it easily. If it's from a less courteous one, you might have to pull the unit out of the computer case so you can examine all sides of it. The label has to be there somewhere.

If your computer is from a big brand name, you can also probably just Google it. For example, I've got an old Dell Dimension 8250 sitting here. The label on the power supply cannot be seen without performing minor surgery, since Dell has no desire to make it easy for their customers to know what they put under the hood in their machines. But when I Google "Dell Dimension 8250 power supply", I find lots and lots of listings from companies selling replacements, each confirming that what's in there stock is a 250-watt box.

If all else fails, you can always plug the thing into a meter.

If you've never opened a computer before, also, tell us what kind it is, what brand and model if it's a major name, and we can tell you how. (I haven't been keeping up with this thread, so I'm not sure if opening cases has been mentioned)

Also, the label can be a little misleading. It has a small table on it with some numbers, but above that should be the type with it's wattage in that line, not within the table.

It's probably printed on the power supply. Open your case and look for it in there. It's expressed in terms of Watts - as in 500w, 350w, 700w, etc.

edit: someday I'm going to answer a question before everyone else does.

Unfortunately, it's actually worse than that. They don't all come with tables on them. Sometimes the numbers are printed in list form, which depending on your point of view, can be better or worse than in table form. Either way, there should be maximum output wattage listed somewhere on the label.

Again though, I wasn't discounting the 2 different GTS's. The difference is in price you pay for what you get with the GT. Even people using the G8800M GTS laptop chip are holding good double digit frame rates in SL, and that one only has 64 stream processors. Its about value and getting the most bang for your buck. Them few extra processors in the new GTS probably wont equate to very much difference at all in SL, and that coupled with the almost $75 price difference between the new GT and the new GTS, is why I suggested the GT is a better value... never said it was a better card, but it IS close.

For power supplies...
Rocketfish (Best-Buy's own inhouse brand) is very good. Can get a quality, shielded cable SLI ready, 24pin 700watt power supply for around $50.

Thank you guys for answering my question about the power supply (and a photo added....thanks Yosef!).

Just a word of caution about the 8800 series....

They run HOT.

Please make sure your system has adequate cooling capabilities.

Even the Pre-built systems should have space for an extra fan.

On a game like 'Crysis', I can easily hit 60-70° C.

I'm going to get a new card this summer (to improve on my 7300GT/256) and I'm down to 2 versions with the same GPU now, from the same manufacturer, with the only difference between them being the RAM size: 256 vs. 512 MB.

Does anyone know of any benchmarks or other solid proof of whether the graphics card's RAM size has a significant impact on SL performance or not?

Thanks.


P.S.: Yes, I've seen the benchmark they posted on the SL Blog last November, but that doesn't help - it only lists GPUs; not a word about RAM sizes there.

450w is pretty much minimum, depending on machine, processors, and number of other devices used. A fully loaded with 2 8800's should really have 1000w.

My Nvidia GeForce 7600GS 512Mb runs SL better than my Nvidia GeForce 8400GS 256MB and the latter card is in a better spec machine.

Not sure that's a fair comparison, though. _600 is a higher grade card than an _400.

That's it, ruin my example by using logic, common sense and techncial information!

Yeah, what would qualify as "solid proof" would have to be at least one example of visibly different performances between otherwise identical cards, with RAM size as their only difference.

But thanks for trying.

Not necessarily so. My fastest machine has a main 550w power supply and a secondary 250w power supply. The 250 powers two 8800GTS cards, and the 550 powers everything else, which includes two DVD drives and four hard drives. Sure, 1000w will power anything, but its not exactly necessary.

Follow the link to a rather useful power supply calculator:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

According to this calculator, my machine needs at least 466w.

Depends on what else you have in the system, but 1000W is sort of overkill. Even for two-card SLI 600-750W should be more than adequate.

E6850 (3MHz Core2Duo)
nVidia 8600gts
4x1G DDR2 1000 ram ***
2x500G SATA300 (Raid1)
Soundblaster x-FI Extreme Gamer
Gigabyte P35c-DS3R *
2x120mm Thermaltake "Smart" case fans
Zalman 9500AT **
Optiarc DVD RW
3.5" floppy
Sandisk SD card reader (external)

Only calculates to approximately 335W, so figure another 100W for the additional card an SLI system, so arguably a system built around similar components with an SLI motherboard and second video card would probably be fine with a *quality* 500W supply.

===
* Yes this is a single-video-slot motherboard, price vs. perfomance generally get more bang out of just getting a better card than two lesser ones. Still valid for power calculation. This is the last Gigabyte board I will ever own. Their bios support sucks, and DDR2 voltage has to be set manually so it doesn't cook the ram.

** Counted as an 80mm high-performance for power calculation

*** Actually 1066 memory underclocked to 1000. Turns out the Intel P35 chip can't support 4 sticks of high-speed memory. I'm eventually going to just get 2x2G.

Depends on how many drives, fans and liquid cooling, how much ram and how many cores and even external devices or lighted keyboards, game pads, etc.

Off the top of my head, I'd guess that a 1000w system would have to include a dual socket motherboard with SLI or Crossfire capability, two processors, dual top of the line video cards, multiple hard drives, multiple optical drives, water cooling, RAM maxed out, multiple lighted fans, a few of those hideous neon tubes and the system would have to be overclocked to high heaven. Given this is the SL forums, I'd bet that at least one of you out there has such a system.

Well no multiple cards nor lighted fans nor neon lights... but my system with a decent video card, a fast AMD processor, 4G RAM, one optical drive and 6 hard drives for a RAID 5 set up killed a 600W supply in a couple of months.. so far the 1000W PSU one is holding up.

Trouble shooting PSU issues is a major pain in the ass..

.d