Soldato
Conflicting reports on that one. At another press conference AMD commented on the 270W directly. If you can survive the mind numbing dreariness of it all, watch AMD Senior VP Rick Bergman talk about it 8.10min in. A journalist asks if they're going to get the 270W R600 power "guzzling" consumption down. The answer is that they didn't have all the "tools" to develop it at the time and the next gen R650 or "whatever" will use less power.nicolasb said:In the video of AMD's recent press conference someone asks if it's true that R600 will use 270W. The reply is that in their demo setup each card is using roughly 200W. The demo setup was an R600 Crossfire rig doing GPGPU-type calculations, i.e. with all of the shaders working absolutely flat out to produce a total of 1 Teraflop.
The fact they used the 150W 8 pin plug at all means the card has the potential to pull more than 225W when overclocked. Interestingly enough the new 8P PCIe plug doesn't actually use more power conductors than the older 6 pin. The 2 extra wires are commons, one of which is planned (not implemented) to be used as a handshake to the PSU to ensure adequate power levels. I see you've found the same interesting thread on the subject at JonnyGURU's forum. As the 2 extra wires are only commons, from a load POV three PCIe 6 pins are not really needed to run the card. In fact 2x6P gives the same number/gauge of load conductors, all that is needed is a 6 to 8 pin adapter with 2 doubled up ground wires. Personally I'd just make my own adapter.nicolasb said:So, all in all, it looks as though the card probably won't ever pull more than 200W unless you're overclocking. If you do overclock then the consumption will get close enough to 225W that they make you use different connectors in order to maintain a sizeable margin for error.
Jonny also comments on this in the Ultra X3 1000w review. Which looks like a good xfire R600 option with a single 70A rail and all the right connectors.
![](http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/4473/image1el7.th.jpg)
I was looking at the latest (May?) PCP&C 750W (single rail!!) should have the 2x8P + 2x6P needed. The review also comments on the new PSU handshake. What I'd be more interested in is the fact that one R600 can get very close to the 240VA overcurrent trip limits of some 12v current rails. Some older PSU's may have problems with R600 depending on the rail implementation, not so much peak wattage.nicolasb said:The lack of 8-pin PCIe 2.0 connectors on most PSUs is very annoying, though.I'm hoping that the 850W Silverstone Olympia PSU (due out in early May) will have the right connectors and be of reasonably good quality. We'll see.
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