Wondered if anyone had thoughts on the following please...

I have upgraded an elderly X800 Pro AGP to a Sapphire X1950 Pro AGP in an attempt to hold off the inevitable lump sum investment into a new Dual core PCI Express machine for just a little while longer...

The Sapphire card arrived yesterday. I have it working fine (ish) but have a query over the PSU. I have a Chieftec 360W PSU currently and the Sapphire card requires two molex connectors to provide the juice - all well and good. The card works, seems stable, and performs reasonably ok.

However, the packaging/box states minimum 450W PSU required. My question is, am I getting the best out of the card using my current PSU or have I got to invest in a new PSU as well? What are the implications of not running with the recommended PSU? In the overall scheme of things is it going to make much difference? It seems to me an unnecessary expense...

Thoughts anyone? Much obliged all.

JT

It depends......the rating for what it needs of 450W would make an assumption for what else your computer has..

Can you do one of those online Power calculators to find out what power your system actually needs?

also remember that as LFS is not very graphics intense, it maybe that the PSU can cope with the demand LFS needs for the graphics, however you may find that other games which require more graphics processing power saps more Power and then your 350W is not enough and you get power issues

If the power delivered from the PSU to your PC did no suffice you'd get blue screen of death screens and/or hardware resets at random intervals.

This is not the case for you so you are ok.

Generally speaking the more Watts the better, because a PSU is like a machine. It's better to work at the 80% of it's capabilities instead of the 95-100%. It's less prone to error and probably will last longer.

The specs from Saphire for the PSU are a little high because they want to cover all the possibilities, like heavy loaded PCs with multiple hard disks and peripherals, to cover the possibility of an overclocked PC and of course they leave a safety margin also, hence the 450W recommendation.

As you said it's an unnecessary expense atm, but if you are planing to add some more hardware at the future or you notice any strange behavior like resets or funny noises etc you'd better change it asap, because a PSU in most cases never dies alone!!! lol (it takes some other parts with it ).

Hope that was helpful, have fun and enjoy your card

Thanks chaps for the responses. I did use the Extreme Outervision (or whatever it's called) PSU calculator last week before I ordered and was well within my current PSU wattage.

So, the outcome is I won't worry about my current PSU. I do not have any overclocking or major components drawing power on this machine - it's very much a processor, memory, graphics card, mouse, keyboard and DFP wheel only kind of affair.

I have some peace of mind from the responses though so thanks again.

JT

i might be wrong but you should be looking at the 12v line amps instead of the wattage of the psu, most of the cheap psu's dont have more than 10-15 amps on the 12v wich isnt enough for a powerfull card AND the rest of your pc, if its running fine and there are no bsod or random resets then its doing its job. personally i have a 450w psu but with two separate 12v lines, one powers the gfx card and the other for hdd's, cd's and a mobo connector. each line has 18amps.

your right, but provided you buy a high (over 500) wattage PSU from a decent company you should be ok