First post, by tehsiggi
Dear all,
I'd like to take this opportunity to give something back to the community.
I currently have several bigger projects going on regarding retro hardware. Some of them are graphics card centric. And then there is my constant effort to repair graphics cards.
In that same effort I built myself a little tool to diagnose the power consumption of AGP cards using a custom riser card.
Usually old reviews basically repeated what the manufacturers said in regards of TDP. Actual power consumption measurements of cards alone, as we are well used to today, were basically unknown. So this tool can be used to diagnose faulty cards in their power behaviour or to figure out the best FPS/Watt card for your build (idle power consumption also being interesting).
It also can help on figuring the importance of PSU rails for certain graphics cards. Some of them are very 3.3V or 5V centric, more modern ones use the 12V instead.
This card will measure all AGP slot power rails, as well as external power via 4pin or 6pin. There are two alternative inputs which accept custom rails for monitoring, e.g., if your want to monitor 12V power to the CPU or something like that. The hardware is relatively simple, using an STM32F103C8T6 microcontroller and three INA3221 power monitors. It has a 4 Pin in- and output as well as a 6 Pin in- and output.
There is an additional header for I2C which would allow to add additional sensors to it. There are pin-headers on the back of the riser, allowing for either easy use to supply power externally without using a mainboard or, more likely, to probe voltage with additional tools like an oscilloscope.
To pass through external power of the GPUs through the riser, I've build some dongles:
I've written a small python application that can interact with the riser card and will provide a table view to monitor the graphics cards power rails. The firmware is written using platform.io.
I validated my results with the "Radeon 9800 Databook" and they appear to be pretty close. Good enough for me.
I hope this might be useful for one and the other. You can find the whole project here on GitHub
I am creating a reference value sheet in my repository as well.
The following cards are going to be added (once I win the driver war on my platform 😦):
- HIS Radeon 9200 128MB VIVO
- HIS Radeon 9200 64MB
- Radeon 9250SE 128MB (Using Mobility 9200 GPU)
- Winstron Radeon 9000 Pro 128MB
- Manli Radeon 9000 64MB
- Radeon 9100 128MB VIVO
- Club3D Radeon 9200 256MB
- Radeon 9500 128MB 256Bit
- Radeon 9550 256MB
- Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB
- Radeon 9600 Pro 256MB DDR2
- Radeon 9700 Pro 128MB
- Radeon 9800 128MB
- Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
- Radeon X700 256MB AGP
- Radeon X1950GT AGP
- GeForce FX5200 128MB 64Bit
- GeForce 6800XT 128MB
That's what I have currently laying around.. and easily accessible.
I could write more about it, but I guess I'll leave that for questions if they arise.
