Gigabyte 6600GT and System Advice

[mandoman]

Hi Guys,

I'm building the follwing 'quiet' system and need advice:

Sonata II (using stock case, ps, and fan)
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-9 Mobo (use stock Northbridge heatsink)
AMD 64 3200+ Venice (use stock retail box heatsink/fan)
Corsair Valueselect CAS3 2x1gb
Vantec 'Iceberg' Aluminum Ram Heat Spreaders
Seagate 80GB SATA Boot Drive
Seagate 400GB SATA File Server Drive
Gigabyte Nvidia 6600GT 128MB PCI-Express Fanless (GV-NX66T128VP)
NEC 3540A DVD+/-RW DL
Sony Floppy Drive
Linux Fedora Core 4

The computer will primarily be running 'headless'
as a fileserver. CPU and Video loads will be very low,
with most of the activity coming from the 400 GB File Server
hard drive, which will run pretty continuously. I will
not be underclocking or overclocking the system.

Secondary function will be 'eventually' adding HTPC functionality
with MythTV by adding a PVR-250/350 card and/or HD-3000 HDTV Tuner Card,
thus the need for the high end video card.

Questions are:

1) What is the expected power dissipation running in the above two
scenarios?

2) What sort of additional cooling might be necessary running under
the above two scenarios? Right now, the plan is to use stock sonata fan
in back, stock ps fan, stock retail cpu fan/heatsink, stock northbridge heatsink,
and 'possibly' use the sonata ii air duct if it will fit in this system.
The computer will be in a poorly ventilited room, though I don't expect
ambient temperatures to get over 95F in the summer.

3) I'm mostly concerned about the video card. I'm hoping it will stay
cool and not take too much current running idle. Any ideas
what sort of current draw/heat there will from it running idle?
Any Linux gurus know if it's possible to 'Sleep' the card under Linux?
I really like this card for it's superior HDTV output capabilities,
even though it will 'rarely' get taxed to it's limits.

Thanks

PS. As long as I'm posting, I want to also thank this forum and it's archives for helping
me identify and fix with a firmware update a 'meowing' hitachi hdd.

[mrzed]

I can't imagine why you would need a 6600GT for HTPC use. The 3d core will not help in any way with video streaming or recording, and the idle draw of the GT is higher than I'd like for a full-time server. Running HD will tax the system, but mostly it means having enough CPU, system memory, and video memory.

If you look at the sticky at the top of the Video thread, there are many links to power consumption for video cards. To sum: the Radeon 9600 series is the best Watt/Performace so far. It's not offered in PCI-Express, but a X600 is based on the same core, so may be similar.

[mandoman]

Thanks for the link. Gosh, my searches didn't find the sticky in the VGA forum
on power dissipation on the 6600gt, and there are the numbers as plain as day!
So, sounds like ~19W idle current for just the card. Hmm, kinda high but possibly tolerable,
depending on the rest of the system current needs.

Thanks for the card recomendations, however I'd like to stick with an nvidia card
since they have much better linux driver support than ati.

I'd agree that I really don't need a 3d performance card, though I do play games
occasionally, but usually those are MAME emulated arcade games which mostly don't
require much 3d acceleration.

The 6600 series cards have 'Pure Video' technology which is supposed to dramatically
improve HDTV out. The 6200 series cards also have this feature, however, the only cards
I could find that were fanless in this series are the 'TC' versions, which I don't
want as they steal system memory. I wouldn't mind a regular 6200 card if I could find a fanless
one with HDTV output.

Earlier nvidia cards it is hard to find pci express versions of or HDTV output is spotty.
So that's how I ended up in the 6600 series. I think a regular 6600 might use a little less
current than the GT, but the performance difference between the two chips is like 2x and
everyone I talk too says get the gt over the vanilla 6600.

I'm up for other suggestions though?

Thanks!

[mrzed]

Well a 6200 if you can find one. If not, a standard 6600 should be easy to find.

The thing is that the "everyone" on the Net usually means gamers or other folks who buy into the "more is always better" philosophy. SPCR is an anomoly, as there is a significant contigent of "less is more."

If you think you will be doing modern 3d gaming, by all means get the GT. Otherwise - why?

[scruzbeachbum]

in any case, you can use Gigabyte's V-tuner to manually lower the clock rates for the core and memory.

[mandoman]

I'm running linux so using the v-tuner might not work. I will have dual boot with win2k, but I'm not sure if the adjustments made with v-tuner would stay in effect after re-booting
back into linux?

[ihameed]

nVidia's latest Linux/FreeBSD/Solaris drivers support CoolBits functionality--you can modify clock speeds to your heart's content from your Xorg configuration file.

[mandoman]

Sweet, so underclocking a 6600gt may be the way to go for most of my applications. Any ideas how much power/heat you can save underclocking the 6600gt to the minimum stable clock speed? The performance charts I've seen only show overclocking #'s.

The 6600 vanilla is still on the table, but I can't find power #'s for it. My assumption at this point is the 6600 is maybe on par at idle and much less at load. Anyone know where I can find those? I think the 6200 vanilla is off the table at this point to since I can't find a fanless version of it as well as the 6200TC since it shares system memory, but I'd still be interested in knowing power/heat numbers for those cards if anyone knows those so I can make my final decision.

OK, so assuming the 6600gt is going to be my worst case video card in terms of heat, will my stock fans do the job at adequately cooling the system?

Thanks!