The Captain needed power for phasers, photon torpedoes, the transporter room, the tractor beam . . . I need more power to drive the ATI FireGL 7600, a parallel processing supercomputer disguised as a video card. Because the world of those who own, or even aspire to own advanced video cards is necessarily exclusive and elite, I now direct my comments to those of you who qualify. The rest may wait for tomorrow's post, when we return to Earth.
The problem with this card is that it draws power, lots and lots of power. There's nothing green about it. . . its double wide, and its got an 8 pin PCIe power connector, puts out enough heat to fry an egg (150 watts fully loaded) Now, you may be thinking: "I don't have a PCIe power plug, but I do have a Molex plug, I'll just get a converter."
Won't cut it . . . life support will fail.
What you need is a converter plug that gangs two molex plugs to one PCIe, and this will only work if a) there's enough spare power in your PSU (I have 550 watts, which seems to be just barely enough) and b) if there's enough power on the 12 volt rail circuit that supplies each of the Molex connectors. It seems that that the Molex connectors do not each individually access the full resources of the PSU.
So my tip for the day for the graphics elite is: experiment with different combinations of molex plugs. Unless the manufacturer helpfully labeled them by circuit (mine didn't) there's no easy way to tell which ones are on which 12v rail, so you have to experiment.
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