Two Power supplies for one video card

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h41cyon

Weaksauce
Joined
Jan 13, 2004
Messages
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All,

I've got a Dell optiplex gx620 at my work that I wanted to put a more beefy video card into. It's currently got an ati x600 pro pci-e that is a bit too weak for my taste.

I also just bought a connect3d ATI X1900GT PCI-E from zipzoomfly for 125 AR (pretty damn good deal IMO)

Now i don't know how much more power the x1900gt is gonna suck over the x600pro, but I'm sure it's prolly more than than 305Watt PSU can handle (besides the dell PSU doesn't have a 6pin PCI-e connector).

Now my fix is, I've got another power supply from a shuttle machine thats ~250 some watts with a pci-e 6pin power connector. I wanted to use this secondary power supply to power the video card through the 6pin connector, and that's it.

Question is, will powering the video card via the 6-pin power connector via a secondary PSU cause damage to the card?
 
h41cyon said:
Question is, will powering the video card via the 6-pin power connector via a secondary PSU cause damage to the card?
Click to expand...

That's a good question. They say that when using two PSUs, they should never be connected together at any point. "Crossloading" or some such.

So that's fine for running things like hard drives and fans off of a 2nd psu.... but a gx card? The GX card gets about 6 amps from the motherboard via the PCI-e slot (afaik). That means with the 6-pin, you'd get 6 amps through the mobo from one psu, and ~8 amps through the PCI-e 6-pin from the other.

Hmmmm.
 
Ok, further googling's I found a guy running a geforce 6800 gt in his gx620 with no problems,

Sounds good except for the fact that that my card would use another 15-20watts ontop of the 6800gt.

and THEN, it occured to me. Dell makes a couple different versions of the gx620, all of them contain a 305Watt PSU.

One of the models uses a 3.4 smithfield Pentium D processor, and mine which uses a Prescott 3.4.

Now I checked to see how much more watts the Pentium D pulls, and it's a CrapLoad, almost 40 more watts then the prescott.

So since they are using the same power supply, I figure if my new video card pulls as much as 40 more watts, I'll still be in range!
 
Yeah that makes sense. You should be alright. Dell uses decent power supplies so I wouldn't worry too much there.
 
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