Opinions on the 9600GT?

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I'm looking to buy a new GPU to complete my system. I was searching around and thinking of spending about £50-£70 on a card, then I figured I may as well splash out and save myself having to upgrade sooner. After looking around, the 9600GT caught my eye. I'll be running it in single configuration with an Antec Earthwatts 500W PSU. At the moment, my gaming needs are simple (WoW and CS) but I'd like to expand my horizons, as it were. Thinking of buying CoD4.

In particular, I was looking at Zotec's card. A couple of questions.

Am I likely to encounter power problems with 500W? I'll be running mobo, a case fan, CPU + fan, 1, possibly 2, ATA harddrives and a DVD drive.

Secondly, I assume the 9600 works with DX9.0c, it's just I've only seen it mentioned that it supports DX10?

Thanks in advance,
-Em
 
500 Watts should be ok, so long as it has at least 26 Amps on the 12Volt rail. If you aren't sure about yours open up your case and take a look at your power supply. Your looking for a chart on it that looks something like this;

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/17-159-021-02.JPG

Not that yours will look exactly like that but look for DC OUTPUT and look along it for the +12v rail then usually listed below it is the maximum amps available. In the case of the picture above that power supply has 15A on the +12v rail.

If that checks out I'd say it should be fine, and yes it is DX9c compatible ;D
 
Thanks again for the assistance, Meka.

I looked on Antec's site for such a table, and I found one. Now there is a 12V1 and 12V2, both at 17A. Combined being 34A. 12V1 runs to the mobo and 12V2 runs to the CPU. Am I looking at the right thing? And if so, do I take the combined current or not? The other closest thing I can see is the -12V measurement which is 0.8A so I'm pretty sure that's not the one.

This is the page I was looking at.
 
Your PSU is probably a little weaker than most people would like to see for that card. What would make it work is if your 2 12V Rails both have molex connectors on them. IF they do then you can use the adapter that comes with the card that takes 2 molex connections and makes 1 PCIe power connection. That way you'd be pulling from both rails at the same time for that card. Last pic on this page is what I'm talking about.

Edit: Going through newegg customer reviews for that card it shows quite a few people are running it on pretty poor PSUs. You can't ever put too much trust into what you read there, but its worth noting that it appears some people are doing it.
 
Thanks for the suggestion SNGX,

Just to clarify, I could take the 2 PCIe 6-pin molex connections from my PSU and transform it into a single connector using the adapter that comes with the GPU? Double checking, the particular model of Earthwatts PSU I have is the only to include two PCIe connections.
 
Actually thats a good question, I too have just realized I have a +12v1 with 18A, +12v2 with 20A and -12v with 1A. So how do you figure out how much A is going to your graphics card? Is it only the +12v1 rail that you take into account because its the one that powers the mobo, thus the PCI-E slot?

I believe that is what SNGX1275 means about the 2 molex connectors to one PCI-e power connection Ehimen ;D
 
Hmmm. Just to note, I ran a BFG 8800 OC GT card with little problems. Although, it was only to BIOS, so nothing that even touch graphical intensiveness. What card do you have, Meka?
 
With the 2 molex to 1 PCIe it should pull equally from both rails, unless 1 rail can't keep up, then the other would step up. At least thats how it 'should' work.
 
I have an alright card, Nvidia 8400 GS. I only had 60$ left for a graphics card after buying a AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor, a M2N-E motherboard, 1GB of ram and I ended up getting a 585 Watt power supply and 250 GB western digital SATA hard drive for free. So all in all it was about a 400$ upgrade, not bad though >=D

Its not the fastest card... or even a gaming one but compared to my old PC its a god, and still preforms well in basically everything made in the source engine (Half-Life 2), usually hovers above 100 FPS ;D Call of duty 4 I can max all the settings as well except only at 800X600 and it stays at about 30 FPS so its quite playable. I tried out Crysis too, all settings had to be on low and that got me about 10-20 fps. I'm really just happy to be out of DirectX 8 and having to put everything on low settings for like 10 FPS. =3

Damn it, logged into the wrong account again XD
 
Ehimen said:
I'm looking to buy a new GPU to complete my system. I was searching around and thinking of spending about £50-£70 on a card, then I figured I may as well splash out and save myself having to upgrade sooner. After looking around, the 9600GT caught my eye. I'll be running it in single configuration with an Antec Earthwatts 500W PSU. At the moment, my gaming needs are simple (WoW and CS) but I'd like to expand my horizons, as it were. Thinking of buying CoD4.

In particular, I was looking at Zotec's card. A couple of questions.

Am I likely to encounter power problems with 500W? I'll be running mobo, a case fan, CPU + fan, 1, possibly 2, ATA harddrives and a DVD drive.

Secondly, I assume the 9600 works with DX9.0c, it's just I've only seen it mentioned that it supports DX10?

Thanks in advance,
-Em
Your EA 500 is good to go @ 34amps
EarthWatts EA500 ~34A
good review:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/526

Most of the time you can't just add the two 12v together but in your psu it works out like that since it's a good quality.

Good link to explain 12v rails:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=205763
 
The problem is each single rail only delivers 17A. So 17*12=204Watts If that card uses around 204W under load he's screwed, and thats assuming nothing else is taking any power from that rail AND assuming 100% efficiency which isn't going to happen. It will be 80-85% efficient so you have 163-173 Watts to work with.

I don't think he card will pull that much, but if you wanted to be real thorough you could just run the molex adapters to each rail.

That guru3d thread is interesting, but I'm not entirely sure he's 100% correct. There is a thread here where me and another guy took a crack at figuring out how the amperages on multiple rails are calculated. I think the formula I worked out is more correct. I'll see if I can find it.

Edit - Found it here: https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic88849.html
SNGX1275 said:
I don't disagree with Rage's seperate rail talk, thats what I was saying in the last paragraph of my previous reply.

Onto the amperage question. I based my discussion about 20A + 20A not = 40A based on:
enermax.jpg


If you look at the Antec Trio they don't show the combined amperage on the 12V system. But I would guess that since 20 + 20 doesn't equal 40, that 16 + 16 + 16 doesn't equal 48. So, with the Enermax it looks to me like you are going to be able to deliver more power down a single 12V rail than the Antec.
antec.jpg


Since I am not sure how they calculate it I don't know what the Antec does total, but my argument above was that according to the sticker, that Antec is only going to give you 16A down any single 12V rail. The Enermax will do 20A, and since we are concerned about high amp draw from a video card, I thought the Enermax was better. Now if you are running 10 hard drives off of this system, you may want the greater total amperage that the Antec will likely give you.

Edit: I think you can roughly calculate total amperage down the rails as: (Rail 1 Amp + Rail 2 Amp + ...n)*(1-1/n)
So in the Enermax case it would be (20 + 20) * (1-1/2) = 30
I checked on 2 of the Enermax Infiniti PSUs (the 650 and the 720) and they had 52 and 56A respectively over 3 rails. Both PSU's had 28, 28, and 30. If you do my math there you get (28 + 28 + 30) * (1-1/3) = 57.3A. That is fairly close to the 56A on the more powerful one.
If you do the math for that Antec Trio above its (16 + 16 + 16) * (1-1/3) = 32A

I'm not sure that what I came up with holds true, I didn't google for an explanation, I just came up with that based on looking at 3 PSUs and their ratings.
 
Instead of complicating taking a " #2 " all you need to know and figure is:

Maximum combined wattage on the combined 12v rails divided by 12 = amps

20a + 20a = 360w divided by 12 = 30, not 40

Every psu manufacturer states spec different, so the above rule is best to use.
In the Earthwatts 500w case, 17a + 17a does equal 34amps.

imageview.jpg



17a + 17a = 408w divided by 12 = 34amps
 
Not every PSU shows the wattage for specific rails though. Look at that TruePower in my above post. So I agree your method is the correct one if you are given the wattage for the rail.
 
SNGX1275 said:
Not every PSU shows the wattage for specific rails though. Look at that TruePower in my above post. So I agree your method is the correct one if you are given the wattage for the rail.
This is true. But in your example the label does state 32amps right on it which is correct. TruePower Trio TP3-430 ~32A

If neither figure is stated and the psu has a high wattage amount, and is cheap that would be cause for the unit to be suspect.
 
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