First post, by 386SX
Hi,
I was wondering if any PCI cards of the old type can be used into any motherboard having the PCI bus from a power draw point of view. I've a mini itx Atom board that has one single PCI slot. In the generic mainboard layout docs they say having tested external (the bios support external video cards) video cards like the Geforce4 MX PCI or the 8400GS PCI I think to remember.
But beside the power supply I switched from a PicoPSU 12oW with a 60W external AC-DC adapter to a low budjet Cooler Master 500W 80Plus I was worried about the wattage video cards for example could ask from the mainboard.
The whole system jumped from 15W-18W with the iGPU to 30W-40W (idle-load) with a Geforce FX 5200 PCI 128bit 256MB DDR. The card heatsink get really hot during gameplay beside it feels slower than the iGPU itself but having a better compatibility even with Win8.1 forced Vista drivers.
Any risks for the mainboard? Soon I should get a GT200 series PCI video card as latest upgrade I'm going to install on this config and I was thinking to how much it would draw power from the bus too.
Thanks.