VOGONS


First post, by Darkman

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so I very recently managed to acquire a Geforce2 Ti (Hercules branded to be precise) to use in my Win98 machine, however the card obviously lacks the Glide support my Voodoo3 had. So my plan is to have 2 graphics cards, the GF2 as the primary one, along with a PCI Voodoo3 for Glide or any other games which may benefit from it.

obviously multiple GPUs isn't a new thing, but what I'm worried about is whether this 250w PSU can handle both cards in addition to all the rest of the things in the system (600mhz Katmai , 4x128MB SDRAM , 2 sound cards, 2 hard drives , CD and floppy drive)

its a pretty hefty setup , so my question is whether a 250w PSU would be enough for all that.

thanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 4, by Old Thrashbarg

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As long as it's an older style unit with hefty 5V and 3.3V rails, then yeah, it'll be plenty. A 250W PSU was on the high end in the PIII days... PC hardware didn't use very much power back then.

Reply 2 of 4, by kixs

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For awhile I run a P-3 866 with Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and Geforce 4 Ti4200 in it with only 150W PSU - MicroATX case with SB 5.1, 2x256mb ram, 320GB 7200 HDD, DVD-RW. There where problems with graphics drivers so now I only have Voodoo 3 AGP in it and it uses maximum 60W on the outlet.

Requests are also possible... /msg kixs

Reply 3 of 4, by TELVM

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This system ...

PIII Tualatin 1400S @ 1.6
440BX
3x 256MB RAM
Geforce 6200
AWE64 Gold
1x Promise Controller
1x SSD
1x HDD
1x DVD
1x Floppy

... draws 90W from the wall on full burner, and that with an ancient topology low efficiency (80% or less) PSU. 90 x 0.8 = 72W .

I'd be very surprised if your system ever draws 150W. A Kill-a-Watt gadget can be very enlightening on these respects.

Let the air flow!

Reply 4 of 4, by Darkman

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looks like it will be fine, thanks for the answers.

though the driver issue kixs mentioned is interesting, Ive heard of numerous examples of a Voodoo3 working with a Geforce card just fine.

could be an issue with the GF4? or potentially the particular version of the Nvidia driver, I tried fairly late drivers on my GF2 Ti and it gave me various issues like all the textures disappearing in No One Lives Forever, or Unreal not working in D3D mode, reverting to the older 56.64 drivers fixed all those issues, so it may very well be something of that nature.