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Old April 14th 04, 09:23 PM
John Lewis
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Default NVidia 6800 Ultra power requirements

Nvidia 6800 Ultra: 110 watts maximum

Power Supply:-

480 watts minimum !!!

Preferably 4 "disk-drive" cables available from power-supply.
Two must be available EXCLUSIVELY for the 6800 Ultra.
( minor exception --- auxiliary fans are allowed to co-use
these cable feeds )

Power-supplies with only 3 cables will need some $2 splitters
on the third cable for the various disk drives --- not a real
problem, since their power consumption is very low.

Also, from the Tom's Hardware Guide review :-
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"..................................
We can also extrapolate the power requirements of the remaining cards
( FX5950, Ati 9800XT ) from these numbers. Assuming that NVIDIA's
quoted maximum power draw of 110 Watts for the 6800 Ultra is correct.
Let's also assume that we reached that worst-case scenario during our
tests. That would mean that the Radeon 9800XT has a maximum power
requirement of about 91,5 Watts, while the FX 5950 needs 93,5 Watts"
-----------------------------------------------------------
..... ever wondered why your 5950 and 9800 got so hot..... ? About
the same as the P4 3.4GHz CPU. However, the heat is spread over the
video board, since the above power-consumption includes that of
memory. My guess at the 5950/9800XT GPUs is around 70 watts...

Since DDR3 memory takes less power than DDR1 and assuming 256meg
will be the 6800Ultra default, , the actual power in the NV40
(16-pipe ) is probably around 95 watts, around 25-watts more than the
existing GPUs, so the nice big 2-slot cooler on 6800 Ultra should be
more than adequate for the new GPU.

BTW, the 6800 non-Ultra (12-pipe) will have only 1 power-connector (!)
and a single-slot cooler, so those thinking of cheesily upgrading the
6800 non-Ultra 12-pipe to the 16-pipe by a BIOS/hardware hack will
probably have to think again. Either the NV40 12-pipe is a totally
different mask or more likely the power supply to the core is divided
into groups of 4 pipes and that the 12-pipe will be parts that fail
(silicon-blemishes) to get all 16-pipes working to spec, with the
failures concentrated in one group, and the power then either
hardware-enabled external to the NV40 or bonded internally to
avoid that group. If externally hardware-enabled, any attempt to
modify the power-enabling arrangement for the 12-pipe NV40 to
enable all 16 pipes is highly likely to burn out the power-regulators
or sag the voltage too much, since regulator power-sharing is
obviously not available on the single-connector board..

John Lewis