Looks very... chinese.

well powercolor was a known brand in the past i belive.
what i dont understand is if the molex is needed. its not even a high end card of that era also.

That's nothing special, actually. AGP only allowed 25 watts. If more power was needed, you either had to add a molex connector or make the card AGP Pro.

This one was also sold by Club 3D:

I've got a radeon 9550 and it doesn't need a molex to be working. I know somebody that has the 9600 and he doesn't need it either

Ah, those weren't the top performing cards of their generation. The R9700 cards had a Berg connector to deliver some extra juice to the GPU.

That's very unusual for a 9550. Those things merely sipped power. I had a 9600XT that was completely powered by the AGP slot, and that was probably twice as fast as a 9550!

If your card uses a standard 9550 BIOS, it probably won't complain if you leave it unplugged. However, if you ever decide to run the card on an older Socket 7 or Slot 1 motherboard, the supplemental power may help to keep things nice and stable (many older boards, especially S7, had trouble delivering enough current through the AGP slot to run newer cards).

I looked up some Radeon 9550 cards and they normally didn't have auxiliary power connectors on them. However, they also didn't have the key to support a 3.3v slot, and yours does. This is an odd card.
I noticed on NewEgg the Powercolor 9550 R96-LC3 was more conventional, 128MB 128bit, 250MHz GPU, no power connector and only had the 0.8v/1.5v key.
The Powercolor 9550 R96-LD3 looks like yours. 256MB 128bit, 250MHz GPU, with power connector and dual keyed.
I don't see why they would have needed extra power if those specs are accurate, and the heatsink certainly doesn't look like a lot of power is being consumed. But it would be safer to plug it in.

As Standard Def mentioned, all I can think of is that maybe they were worried about early AGP motherboards (which maybe they were trying to support with the extra key on the connector).
Some early AGP motherboards (generally those that used an AT power supply) weren't capable of providing as much current through the AGP slot as the standard required, so at least with those motherboards I'd definitely use the molex.

shamino wrote:

As Standard Def mentioned, all I can think of is that maybe they were worried about early AGP motherboards (which maybe they were trying to support with the extra key on the connector).
Some early AGP motherboards (generally those that used an AT power supply) weren't capable of providing as much current through the AGP slot as the standard required, so at least with those motherboards I'd definitely use the molex.

That's true, mainly because they had a 3,3V regulator on board instead of using 3,3V from the PSU (some cheaper old ATX PSU's didn't have the 3,3V line). Asus P2L97 and Abit LX6 are two ATX boards with 3,3V regulators on board.

I have a stack of AGP Nvidia Quadro cards from around the same era that have MOLEX connectors. Not overly common but certainly not unheard of.

That looks like keeper if you ask me, 3.3v connector and I wonder what vram that is as it is a very late production card probably late 2000s from nos chips. Boot it and upload a screen of gpuz if you can.

ATI 9800 PRO, 9800XT used the same kind of molex.