X1950XT power requirements

[mallett]

Evening all,

I'll get straight to the point, will a new Antec EarthWatts 430W PSU be meety enough to power a X1950XT card? I recommended the PSU to my brother and now feel a bit sheepish as graphics card box claims that it needs a 450W PSU and that there should be 30A running off the 12V rail. Now the problem arises from the PSU claiming an output of 17A on each of the two 12V lines.

From my readings on the matter, it appears that anything above 450/460W will do fine, which leads me to wonder if 430 is enough.

I guess that other important information is what else is in the system, well as I can recall there is;
Intel P4 @ 3.0Ghz
2 HDD's
DVD drive
Card reader
Sound card
TV card
and a few USB's and such
and its all plugged into a crappy Dell motherboard

If all this rambling makes any sort of sense then I would be grateful for any help you lot can give, although its not the most important thing in the world at the moment as it wont fit in the old dell machine because of their wisdom in rearranging everything around and making it up-side-down, but thats another matter for some other time...
cheers

[Pob255]

My guess is that you'll be pushing it, might get away with it, might not.
On the 12v rails you should be ok, but again close (very few PSU have single high ampage 12volt rails these days)

Really hard to say, the p4 is quite power hungery (81w-89w depending on exact chip) and does depend on the pull from all the other things.

Real problems might come a few months down the line as the PSU starts to age.

[jimbouk]

I'm currently running a X1950XT on 430W Antec PSU (the one that comes with the Antec Fusion case). No trouble to report. My system probably uses slightly less energy that yours (AM2 3800+ EE, 1hdd), but hopefully not too much of a difference...

[Pob255]

Nice to know jimbouk, the athlon 64 x2 3800+ uses 89w so it's about the same.
Deffinately looking more hopeful

An Antec Earthwatts is decent PSU, which means if it starts to struggle you'll get system instablity and if it does die on you it shouldn't take any components with it.

[mallett]

cheers guys, and jimbouk thats really good news, means that i come out of this with out egg on my face which is always good! (for now anyway)

i also realised that he only has a 17" screen too so he wont come close to pushing the card to its limits and therefore it shouldnt draw all the power that it can. and i also realise that a 1950xt on a 17" screen is rather overkill but as it was only £105 so you might as well really!