R300 FireGL using external power supply?

[trollop]

I noticed over on Darkcrow (a Korean site I read just to look at the purdy piktars ^.^; ) that what they are purporting to be the R300-based FireGL card appears to be lacking the power connector the 9700 has. Eh? But wait, what's that? Looking towards the back of the card it takes up two expansion brackets. What's that connector on the second bracket?

Is that *gasp* an external power supply connector?

 

[Dio]

I don't know anything specific about the FireGL boards. But all AGP Pro boards must take up more than one bracket. Was the AGP connector perchance an AGP Pro one?

 

[Dave Baumann]

Yes, it is.

 

[ben6]

I was told by a FireGL product manager (ugh , don't want to get him in trouble) that there would be at least one FireGL X1 product (the 256MB version) that requires a external power supply. As the product was still under development when I had this conversation, the decision hadn't been made as to whether it would be a external power supply or a PCI daughtercard providing the extra power needed

 

[horvendile]

For irrational reasons, I find the idea of having a graphics card with a separate power supply appealing, not to say cool.

Why is that? Well, the more power it needs, the better it must be, right?

Ideally, the light in the rest of the neighbourhood should go out when I fire up my computer!

(I am perfectly aware that there are serious downsides with high power requirements. That, however, doesn't stop me from appreciating the fact that my CPU puts out more heat per area than my stove plates.)

 

[jb]

Heheh

maybe they can call it the Binford 10,000 FireGL Pro

(bad Home Improvement joke)

 

[Dan G]

I noticed over on Darkcrow (a Korean site I read just to look at the purdy piktars ^.^; ) that what they are purporting to be the R300-based FireGL card appears to be lacking the power connector the 9700 has. Eh? But wait, what's that? Looking towards the back of the card it takes up two expansion brackets. What's that connector on the second bracket?

Is that *gasp* an external power supply connector?

If it's using an AGP Pro connector, it should have plenty of power available to it already. AGP Pro is designed to support higher power devices... that's what separates it from conventional AGP.

I haven't looked to see how this has changed with AGP 3.0 (if it's changed at all), but with AGP 2.0 the AGP Pro boards came in two types. The first was AGP Pro50, which allowed for between 25W and 50W of power to the device, and provided two slots of clearance to the card. The second was AGP Pro110, which allowed for between 50W and 110W of power to the device, with three slots of clearance.

The mounting bracket on the back of the depicted board is clearly a double-wide bracket, suggesting that the board has at least 50W of power available from the AGP slot alone. I'd imagine that this is probably already sufficient... why would an external power supply be needed?

I'd guess that the mysterious connector is actually for the "stereographics" features... shutter glasses?

 

[no_way]

... That, however, doesn't stop me from appreciating the fact that my CPU puts out more heat per area than my stove plates.

People from Greenpeace will are not happy with you. I hope that every extra CPU cycle you have goes to SETI so we can find those alien schematics for clean fusion reactor before this planet becomes inhabitable.