I'm just gonna go ahead and see if the little PSU can take it! I might take a trip to my local PC repair shop later and get a cheap 400W PSU and see what other old bits he's got 😀

200W is just too low IMHO

keropi wrote:

200W is just too low IMHO

Yeah thats what i was thinking but i remember it having plenty of Amps on the +12V rail but i cannot remember if old PCI and AGP cards took their power from the 12V rail? Anyhow just to be safe i think an average 300W-400W PSU will suffice 😀

yeah, 200W IIRC was the psu's of late 486's and pentium1 pc's , from pII and upwards I remember 300/320/350W psu's

keropi wrote:

yeah, 200W IIRC was the psu's of late 486's and pentium1 pc's , from pII and upwards I remember 300/320/350W psu's

I've actualy seen many OEM manufacturers using PSU's as weak as 160W to power Pentium 4 machines! I'm not sure how they managed that? They must be extremely efficient PSU's with high Amperage. Some old Dell Optiplex PIII machines were using 90W and 110W PSU's 😮

They would use very low power components beyond the P4.

One of my friends had a Gateway P4 that came with one of those sub 200W PSUs. It was fine with its GeForce 4 MX. But put in a Radeon 9700 and that changed. 😀

Why mess with less than a 300W? Get one of those nice 80 Plus PSUs and be joyful. Unless you need -5v, that is (rare).

They would use very low power components beyond the P4.

Not really... it was the same standard components everyone else used. People tend to vastly overestimate the amount of power required by computers. Part of that's probably attributable to the fact that the average $20 "500W" power supply that most people buy is usually only good for 200W in reality.

I have a Dell Optiplex here with one of those 90W PSUs. It has a 600mhz Katmai in it, the single most power-hungry PIII made, and the entire system draws 35W from the wall at idle, and around 80w under full load. I doubt the PSU is super efficient, either, so the actual loaded DC draw is probably more like 60W.

I don't know the power consumption of a Voodoo2, but it's unlikely to be more than 10-15W per card considering that the things can get away without even a heatsink. A Rage Fury MAXX can't draw more than about 25W, simply because that's all a standard AGP slot can provide without the extra AGP-Pro power connector or an external molex. While there may be some draw on the 12V rail, it wouldn't be more than a couple amps at most... the bulk of the draw is going to be on the 5V and 3.3V lines.

Considering that Seasonics are generally pretty honestly rated, that 200W PSU should be plenty as long as it's in good shape (i.e., caps haven't degraded), and you're not running a bunch of hard drives or anything.

Well that is why they could put a 160W PSU in a P4 2.0 GHz. With a GeForce 4 MX, a PCI modem, 1 HDD and a microATX mobo, I'm thinking max load would be around 100W? I'm fairly sure it was an early Northwood P4 2.0, which according to Wikipedia is a ~55W CPU when loaded down.

My wording on the "very low power components" line was bad.

But if you put in a Radeon 9700 as I tried, it started freezing and rebooting in games. Those cards need auxiliary power and it must have put the PSU over the top. I imagine one of the rails was simply overloaded.

Those cards need auxiliary power and it must have put the PSU over the top. I imagine one of the rails was simply overloaded.

Most likely. The 9700 really wasn't all that heavy on the power requirements (by modern standards, anyway), but IIRC it did use considerably more on the 12V line than previous cards. Considering that a P4 would also use quite a bit on the 12V line, and a 160W PSU isn't likely to have a lot of headroom on that rail, it would make sense that the video card would push things over the edge, even if the total power consumption of the system was well under 160W.

And yeah, with the GF4MX and 1 HDD, I'd putthat system at about 90-100W under load, and probably around 130W with the 9700.