Modern Graphics Cards aka Room Heaters

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Merlin

Merlin

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I have been sent two graphics cards by an AmiBay member for repair and I did some reflow work over the weekend. On completing the work and re-assembly, I encountered some problems in testing them.

My test rig was an HP DX2400 motherboard with a quad-core Q6600 and 2Gb of DDR2-667, running Windows 7 Home Premium. The PSU was a decent quality 600 watt one, albeit one that's getting on a bit.

The first (an Nvidia GTX 480) installed correctly and was fine at the desktop, but any attempt to run Windows Experience Index or any benchmarking resulted in my test rig rebooting. Huh? :blink: :nuts:

The second one (a Radeon 4870 X2) wouldn't even install Catalyst Control Centre without a crash and reboot. I had to use an older Radeon HD 5450 to install CCC then swap the cards over. This setup wouldn't get past the 'pulsing Windows logo' stage and crashed just before the desktop came up. Double huh!? :wooha:

It was then that I thought 'RTFM' and went to read up on these cards. The GTX 480 needs a minimum of 470W and the 4870 X2 needs 600W on it's own!! Blimey O'Reilly! A 1kW PSU is 'recommended'!! :wooha:

These cards also run HOT, like molten lava, or the centre of the Sun type hot, hotter than a hot thing with hot things and Naga chillies sprinkled all over them - with these cards, you don't need central heating!!

I nearly branded my fingers by not letting one cool off before removing it from the rig. I toasted myself nicely on Saturday while I tried to test these cards in the current heatwave in the UK. These cards run at 70C plus just at the Windows desktop. I dread to think how hot they get under load.

I've had to loan these to my son Ian to test, as these suck the life out of my PSUs and leave them looking liked deflated balloons. His rig has a 1200W PSU and that's more than a single bar electric fire, fer Gawd's sake!!

Whatever happened to Energy Star, as far as graphics cards are concerned?

[/whine]
 
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if you buy high end gpus you pay for the electric and heat. thats why I keep to the midrange cards all the 60s
 
No wonder they develop soldering problems if they desolder the components on their own just by running. :)

I think though that 1kW PSU seems quite overrated unless you're running 2/3 cards in the same machine. There's a big difference in the quality of PSUs though and 600W isn't just 600W. Some develop too much ripple at even half their rated wattage to have anything sensitive running stable. I'm not saying that your PSU is bad, but I am not sure what you mean by 'decent'. :) If it's a value for money choice meant to run a normal PC, that could be considered decent and good enough for most setups.

We can quickly agree on that high end Gfx cards uses far too much power, but if you buy a Lamborghini you probably won't worry too much about gas costs either. :)
 
Merlin said:
These cards also run HOT, like molten lava, or the centre of the Sun type hot, hotter than a hot thing with hot things and Naga chillies sprinkled all over them - with these cards, you don't need central heating!!
Click to expand...

Then I won't even start with my HD6990 :-D
That thing is like a red giant and it has a fan that is able to produce massive vortexes on that same red giant.

And yeah, my rig really needs a proper 1KW psu.
I already fried 2 cheap 1,2KW psu's,

I got a Corsair HX1000, and, knock on wood, it's doing well.
 
Buzzfuzz said:
Merlin said:
These cards also run HOT, like molten lava, or the centre of the Sun type hot, hotter than a hot thing with hot things and Naga chillies sprinkled all over them - with these cards, you don't need central heating!!
Click to expand...
Then I won't even start with my HD6990 :-D
That thing is like a red giant and it has a fan that is able to produce massive vortexes on that same red giant.

And yeah, my rig really needs a proper 1KW psu.
I already fried 2 cheap 1,2KW psu's,
Click to expand...

The 6990 is rated for 375W which is the maximum it will ever use (and the max a PCI-E 2.0 card is allowed to use), so a proper 600W PSU should be enough, given it can provide enough current on the relevant rails.
 
Guilty as charged ;)

Both ran high 90's at room temperature 20-22 god knows how hot they run in this weeks weather. :D

Both cards you can get under load around the high 70's as long as you dont mind the fan noise.

The 480 was plugged into a thermaltake toughpower 1kw
The 4870x2 was plugged into a CoolMaster 700w Modular Silent Pro PSU
50amp on 12v rail with peak 840w.
 
There was a time when video cards were hard on power supplies, but that has all but passed. There are some very high end video cards that can require a lot more power, but if you have one of those, you can afford the power supply to run it.
I have an i7-3820 @ 3.6Ghz, 16GB of DDR3 2133, 5 internal hard drives, Radeon 7970 3GB supporting 3 monitors, and I have a 750W Thermaltake power supply, and even running modern games like Tomb Raider @ max everything, I don't have any issues.
I ran my old machine (Core 2 quad Q9650 with Dual Radeon 4850s) on the same power supply also with no trouble.
 
would you consider water cooling merlin?

air cooled only works upto a certain point.
 
Whereas I'm running a PC with a Matrox G450 graphics card! :lol:

Tell you what, it doesn't use much energy!
 
These cards can draw up to 40A :wooha: on the 12v rail and I suspect that this is the problem. Ian's into benchmarking and I've asked him to use his power meter when he's testing these cards, to see what difference they make to the power required to run the rig. It should make interesting reading.
 
My laptop is impressive on power consumption.

i7 2.4, 16gb ram, 680m4gb, 256gb msata and 750gb/8gb hybrid drive, 17"led 1920x1080, wifi, bluetooth, bluray writer. All will run of a battery abiet for only 45minutes :)
 
@ demolition

My 600W PSUs on my more powerful rigs are either Thermaltake or Corsair. That being said, they are getting on a bit, so the efficiency will have dropped off somewhat. 600W was 'decent' a few years ago...
 
I've seen an ordinary PC which was unstable with a brand new, but cheap 450W PSU. I had it replaced with another identical one, but the problem remained. When I replaced it with a high quality 350W Seasonic, the problems disappeared.

I think many people generally buy too big PSUs for their PCs, which ruins the efficiency. Switch mode supplies works best at high load, and a smaller rated PSU will run cooler with the same load. Of course, the PSU needs to be able to supply enough current for all situations, but this is not generally a problem except for serious SLI/Crossfire setups.
 
i always thought switchmode supplys ran best under 50% of there rated capacity.or there abouts.
 
The 80 PLUS rating that many PSUs now use, favors efficiency at 50%. This means that manufacturers design the PSUs to achieve peak efficiency at 50% load, so the optimum, efficiency-wise, is to keep it around this point. But there is no reason not to take it to 80% under stress conditions as a proper PSU should be perfectly happy with that.
It's not so good if you're only loading it 10-15% while idling which is what most PCs do most of the time.
Here's an article about choosing the correct PSU:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/power-supply-psu-review,review-32270.html
 
demolition said:
I've seen an ordinary PC which was unstable with a brand new, but cheap 450W PSU. I had it replaced with another identical one, but the problem remained.
Click to expand...

Time, Tiny and quite a few other manufacturers used to do this. They'd put in a PSU rated at *just* enough to run the machine as built; any further upgrades put in would cause it to trip out, forcing you back to them for the upgrades, if you weren't savvy enough to do the upgrade yourself.
 
This sort of ludicrous and excessive power usage is partly why I mostly use ARM-based hardware, nowadays, myself... :p
 
NinjaRabbit said:
This sort of ludicrous and excessive power usage is partly why I mostly use ARM-based hardware, nowadays, myself... :p
Click to expand...
Intel can also do low power very well today as they do a lot to turn off/down stuff when not in use. I have a Lenovo W520 laptop with a Core i7 CPU, 8 GB RAM and SSD which uses ~7-8W when idling on the desktop, and that's with the screen on (although on lowest brightness). It'll last 9 hours on one battery charge, so can't complain about that. :-)
 
I got the graphics cards back today after my son Ian gave them a thorough workout via Furmark and Unigine Heaven on his machine.

I was right, they both needed heavy amounts of power and they have both come back with a clean bill of health.

Result!! :thumbsup2:


@ Sardine

I need your address details please.
 
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