What PSU do you intent to use in this build?

9600XT doesn't need a lot of power, but I'm not 100% positive this card uses only 12v (doesn't have a molex connector iirc).

200W isn't a lot, but it will also depend on the build quality of your PSU.

Dell 200W psu (Used in Pentium 4/Celeron WinXP Dell Dimensions) They seem to be reliable. The model is HP-P2007F3 (It was used in for example, a Dell Dimension 4400)

Could you please post the rails of your PSU?

The PSU I find has 14A on the 12v line while you mention yours has 10A

Your P3 eats about 25W to 30W, all from the 5v line. I don't really know from the rest of your hardware, but usually GPU and CPU are the most significant power consumers.

Ok:

AC Input (50-60Hz):

100 - 127v~/ 6a
200 - 240v~/ 3a

DC Output

+5v --/22a
+3.3v --/14a
+5vFP --/2a
+12v --/10a
-12v --/1a

+5v and +3.3v shall not exceed 135w

max output power 200w

computergeek92 wrote:

Ok: […]
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Ok:

AC Input (50-60Hz):

100 - 127v~/ 6a
200 - 240v~/ 3a

DC Output

+5v --/22a
+3.3v --/14a
+5vFP --/2a
+12v --/10a
-12v --/1a

+5v and +3.3v shall not exceed 135w

max output power 200w

My apologies for not getting back to you sooner.

The PSU looks very minimal, but as you said (and as I've heard from other retro PC builders), these PSUs should be good for their stated amps.

First of all, make sure your PSU pinout is compatible with the motherboard you intent to use. Some of these PSUs have some of the pins swapped around and without an adapter (these should be available on ebay for instance) you'll run the risk of frying something.

Next is the limited 200Ws of your PSU. The kinda good news is, is that I think it might be possible (no guarantees here. And it's your stuff so in the end you can do whatever you want with it). I know I've build s370 rigs using FSP 250W PSUs, but with those rigs I tried to keep the power requirements down by being more careful with which components I selected.

My Celeron 800 s370 rig (I just had a look) contains the Celeron 800 (obviously 🤣), a Voodoo 3, 3 sticks of SDRAM (64 megs each), single optical/hard/floppy drive and a simple sound card.

Personally, I'd try to get a more powerful PSU (300W with a nice 5v line) or downscale your build by losing one of the optical drives and perhaps also downscale the CPU to 800MHz and perhaps the graphics card too. I know you won't be happy to hear this, but if you had a 300W PSU, you wouldn't have this issue now.

A difference of 200MHz from, say, a 1GHz to a 800MHz Coppermine isn't very much, but the 1GHz may use up to 30W while the 800MHz often goes up to only 20W with relatively minimal performance loss.

I don't want to give you the green flag, it's up to you afaic.

Thanks. I also read this article just now about how the card could work on a 180W psu. Strange as it is, some poster on there used his Athlon XP 2500+ (much higher tdp) with a 200w psu and the 9600xt! So I think I will at try it out.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/181217-28-radeon-9600-180w

You're not only fine, you're good to go! Both the P3 and the 9600XT are misers when it comes to power consumption. I would be surprised if your system draws more than 100W at full burn.

I ran a 9600XT for years in my HTPC specifically because of its ultra-low power consumption. I only retired it when I wanted a card that could do 1080p without any hiccups. If you tweak things well, the 9600XT can be massaged into doing 720p.

Check out these links:

http://forums.atomicmpc.com.au/index.php/topi … equirements-v2/

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/Int … U933256%29.html

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/Int … 933256E%29.html

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium-III/Int … 26PZ933256.html

Also, just FYI, you should really be using PC133 RAM with that CPU. It will seriously improve performance.

heh I typed PC100 by mistake. It really does have PC133 ram. Thanks for your post too. But your last 3 links are the exact same processor and speed. Mine is the slot 1 version.

Yeah, I wasn't sure which one you had, so I posted all three. I wanted you to see that it would only draw 32W at most.

Well I plugged in the card and installed Windows 2000 yesterday with no problem. At times I noticed that the psu fan was whirring oddly, (Due to old age) so I knew it was time to replace the fan. When I opened up the power supply, I saw one leaking capacitor! 🙁 I previously opened up the psu unit before upgrading to the 9600XT to check for bad caps, so i’m positive this is a new failure. I'm glad I detected the flaw in time so no parts got damaged. As techs say, power supply rails really do degrade over time. That site I was looking at was from back when the Dell power supplies were new and still had years ahead of them. All and all, just some bad luck for me, I'll play it safe this time and look for a 300W with more 12V amps.