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Voodoo5 power draw laugh

H

H-street

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 25, 2005
Messages
4,538
i was reading some old voodoo5 reviews and came across this for a good chuckle

guru3d.com said:
Installation of the videocard was somewhat strange. Just like any other videocard, insert it into your system and then the strange part. You have to connect a power cable directly from the PC's power supply (such as a HD power cable) towards the Videocard. Why ? Because the the Voodoo5 5500 simply is a power drain. Each VSA-100 chip can use up to 15 Watts of energy, resulting in a 30 Watts power usage!
Click to expand...

http://guru3d.com/review/3dfx/voodoo5_5500/
 
A potential increase in 10 x the power but I reckon alot more than 10 x the speed improvement, not bad really.
 
Yeah, let's see... A single Radeon HD 4890 draws around 60W at idle. I have two in this machine, so 120W idle from GPUs alone. Load is around 190W per card. So 380W load. That's a little more than 12 and a half Voodoo 5 5500s.

Theoretically you can place up-to 32 VSA-100 chips on a videocard. Considering that each chip uses 15 Watts and needs 32Mb memory we might as well buy an external generator next to the PC for such a card LOL!
Click to expand...

480W theoretical draw from this 32 chip theoretical setup... only 100W more than my current setup. People with Quad-Fire, running two 4870X2s, are pushing well past that point. Dear god we need to tell them! Where are their generators?
 
it was more fun back then oc / mods were just starting now its kinda not the same.

I dont know the thrill of clocking your crleron 366 to 550 was more fun than c2d or c2q
 
NeonGuy said:
it was more fun back then oc / mods were just starting now its kinda not the same.

I dont know the thrill of clocking your crleron 366 to 550 was more fun than c2d or c2q
Click to expand...

I enjoyed OCing my E6420 C2D from 2.15Ghz to 3.6+Ghz a lot more than I ever did messing around with any of the Pentiums or Athlons I had during the Voodoo / 3DFX era.
 
NeonGuy said:
it was more fun back then oc / mods were just starting now its kinda not the same.

I dont know the thrill of clocking your crleron 366 to 550 was more fun than c2d or c2q
Click to expand...


I OC's a K6-II from 300mhz to 400mhz and OMG that was epic in CS with a voodoo2 PCI 3D card with a trident something for 2d.
 
well of course its guna have a low power draw that thing doesnt even have 1/4 the transistors of a current gen video card.... lol
 
Who could forget the Voodoo 5 6000 and its external power supply?

3dfx_voodoo5_6k_2.jpg
 
I have a 5500 in my old gaming computer I inherited from my brother along with its 1 GHz AMD CPU, whole GB of RAM and 16 GB HDD.

It is soooo full of win. So many good memories on that machine (mainly Civ, Half-Life, and Homeworld).
 
I sure hope in 10 years from now we don't look back at current video cards and laugh at how little power they used. :eek: The PCIe 3.0 spec is supposed to remove the 300w limit for graphics cards, so future models we may see even more heat/power usage. Who knows, maybe we will see 3 slot video cards or the entire form factor worked around so they can provide more cooling in the future.
 
Ah yes, the time when a 450 Watt PSU would be considered 'high-end' instead of 'budget' :p

*pokes 1.6 KW PSUs*

I doubt videocards will use a lot more power in the future than they do now, though, unless watercooling becomes a requirement. There's no easy way to crank up the cooling like we did with passive to active cooling. 300 Watt is a lot of power already anyway.A 4-GPU setup like that will already require that 1.6 KW PSU :p
 
Thats a good amount for the year 2000 ish. Of course today, with gpu's being more complex, is going to pull more power. :rolleyes:
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
lol I am running a Radeon 3870 with a Core 2 Duo setup off of 350W for a long time now..............it is for one of the kids in the basement
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Using a 350 Watt Enermax from 2001 with an AM2+ system at the moment :)

Those uATX boards with integrated video really don't take much juice. No wonder OEM systems generally have 350 Watt PSUs or slightly better.
 
Elledan said:
Using a 350 Watt Enermax from 2001 with an AM2+ system at the moment :)

Those uATX boards with integrated video really don't take much juice. No wonder OEM systems generally have 350 Watt PSUs or slightly better.
Click to expand...

Most OEM systems I've worked on have had 250w, ~300w, and rarely 375-400w.
 
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