The Nvidia 7800GT Dual is an oddball card from that era. Nvidia made a dual chip card back in 2004-2005 and they deemed it so power hungry that it had supplementary power routed to the rear, and an external power supply brick was packaged alongside it. It was a monster of a card, measuring nearly 10 inches long, and could make a 350W PSU beg for mercy. How the times have changed
I built a PC out of some spare parts recently, and was marveling at not having to plug a power cable into the graphics card (a 1050 Ti). The sacrifices we make for graphics quality…
When I upgraded my PC decades ago, it didn’t even have a heatsink. Just bare ceramic. Fans weren’t really a requirement until the Pentium era, or maybe the late 486 era.
Can’t speak for the most modern ones which I know are worse, but I was pretty surprised when I recently got a smart plug with power monitoring recently to find that my system with a 3080 (though, undervolted slightly), 16-core cpu, way too many peripherals, eight various drives, several small screens and dual monitors, only pulls 600-650W under full load.
I got the plugs to help me choose an appropriate UPS, and I don’t need one as powerful as I’d thought I would.
I need to get one of those. I have 5 spinning disks + 1 SSD, though not much else high powered - it’s a file server, CPU is at least 8 years old, and GPU (if you can even call it that) is passively cooled… I just replaced my 500W power supply because its fan had died (explains why occasionally I’d come home and find it powered off) and nothing under 650W had enough SATA power connectors, so that’s what I ended up with. Curious how overkill it is…
I run Linux on an old gaming PC that I use as a file server / jellyfin server / homeassistant / probably a bunch more I’m forgetting, and that one rarely goes above 50W, lol. Haven’t tested it under full load, though.
Aren’t modern GPUs more in the 200-500W range? They’ve gotten very power hungry recently.
remember when they just plugged into the motherboard and didn’t need multiple external power connections?
The Nvidia 7800GT Dual is an oddball card from that era. Nvidia made a dual chip card back in 2004-2005 and they deemed it so power hungry that it had supplementary power routed to the rear, and an external power supply brick was packaged alongside it. It was a monster of a card, measuring nearly 10 inches long, and could make a 350W PSU beg for mercy. How the times have changed
Hey, I had ATI 6990… those were the times
HELL YES ATI CLAN REPRESENT!
My 5990 mined me SO much early bitcoin (now if I had just saved any)
the *990 series were BEASTS, literally had to cut out metal in my drive bays just to fit it in.
I built a PC out of some spare parts recently, and was marveling at not having to plug a power cable into the graphics card (a 1050 Ti). The sacrifices we make for graphics quality…
The days of powering your computer with a potato are long behind us comrad
Haha one of my earliest PCs didn’t even have a CPU fan!
When I upgraded my PC decades ago, it didn’t even have a heatsink. Just bare ceramic. Fans weren’t really a requirement until the Pentium era, or maybe the late 486 era.
There was some crossover, there were a few Dx4 100s that shipped with small fans and some pentiums were passive cooled even up till the Pentium 2’s.
Some people even scoffed at fans for noise pollution, the arguments were kind of fun to watch at the time.
Can’t speak for the most modern ones which I know are worse, but I was pretty surprised when I recently got a smart plug with power monitoring recently to find that my system with a 3080 (though, undervolted slightly), 16-core cpu, way too many peripherals, eight various drives, several small screens and dual monitors, only pulls 600-650W under full load.
I got the plugs to help me choose an appropriate UPS, and I don’t need one as powerful as I’d thought I would.
I need to get one of those. I have 5 spinning disks + 1 SSD, though not much else high powered - it’s a file server, CPU is at least 8 years old, and GPU (if you can even call it that) is passively cooled… I just replaced my 500W power supply because its fan had died (explains why occasionally I’d come home and find it powered off) and nothing under 650W had enough SATA power connectors, so that’s what I ended up with. Curious how overkill it is…
I run Linux on an old gaming PC that I use as a file server / jellyfin server / homeassistant / probably a bunch more I’m forgetting, and that one rarely goes above 50W, lol. Haven’t tested it under full load, though.
I hope people are using that power for worthwhile things.
Uhh yeah, totally! Hides AI-generated image of a scantily-clad anime girl with twelve fingers and three tits.
I can’t tell if that was generated with a weak and lazy prompt or an incredibly detailed prompt asking for that exact configuration.
lol
RX 560 runs at 50w and can run old games at 1080p
Is 7 years old modern though?
That’s about how long it’s been since I’ve gotten a new card, so I’m going to say yes.
an rx580 isn’t modern, but still can run cyberpunk 2077 well.