problems powering graphics card.

[Mr spoon sheep]

so I have an old pc that was just collecting dust and decided to make an emulation station out of it. I want to upgrade my graphics card to a 1060 3gb wihich I have on hand from an upgrade to my workstation. but I have a problem, its an old dell which has cut down power to the pcie slot so that the max is 35w instead of 75w. as you probably relize by now this is a problem for power the card since it only has a single 6pin connector. this means that the card will only be able to draw about 110w and the tdp is 120w for a 1060 3gb plus its an asus dual oc and the bios is too locked down to limit power consumption. for a bit more refrence the power supply doesnt have a pcie 6pin connector but I am planning on using a separate psu and a dual molex to 6pin power adapter which will be able to easily supply the  75w max for a 6pin. so my question is:

 

what will happen if the power supply isn't outdone but the card isnt getting enough power?

[AndreiArgeanu]

I wouldn't recommend using the stock power supply, they're not exactly firecrackers like some PSU's but they were never meant to be used with high power gpus. I'd imagine if the GPU doesn't get enough power it clocks down. Also you don't need to change BIOS settings to limit power consumption, programs like MSI Afterburner allow you to do that pretty well.

[TwilightRavens]

10 minutes ago, Mr spoon sheep said:

so I have an old pc that was just collecting dust and decided to make an emulation station out of it. I want to upgrade my graphics card to a 1060 3gb wihich I have on hand from an upgrade to my workstation. but I have a problem, its an old dell which has cut down power to the pcie slot so that the max is 35w instead of 75w. as you probably relize by now this is a problem for power the card since it only has a single 6pin connector. this means that the card will only be able to draw about 110w and the tdp is 120w for a 1060 3gb plus its an asus dual oc and the bios is too locked down to limit power consumption. for a bit more refrence the power supply doesnt have a pcie 6pin connector but I am planning on using a separate psu and a dual molex to 6pin power adapter which will be able to easily supply the  75w max for a 6pin. so my question is:

 

what will happen if the power supply isn't outdone but the card isnt getting enough power?

You won’t get a display, if a card requires 75W from PCI-E then you have to have it, if you don’t it either will simply not work, you’ll get blank screen crashes, or random blue screens.

 

Basically if you are limited to 35W on the PCI-E then the fastest card you can possibly put in there would be a GDDR5 GT 1030 as those require only 30W to power.

 

Also I’m pretty sure if its a PCI-E 16x slot then the spec requires it to be 75W, manufacturers are not allowed to alter that spec in any way, shape or form. However if its an 8x slot then i’m not sure if the wattage is any different.

[Mr spoon sheep]

7 minutes ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

I wouldn't recommend using the stock power supply, they're not exactly firecrackers like some PSU's but they were never meant to be used with high power gpus. I'd imagine if the GPU doesn't get enough power it clocks down. Also you don't need to change BIOS settings to limit power consumption, programs like MSI Afterburner allow you to do that pretty well.

the problem is Im running manjaro and afterburner is windows only right? because I really dont need it to be running at full capacity. as long as it isnt the hd6450 1GB card that is in it right now

[AndreiArgeanu]

8 minutes ago, Mr spoon sheep said:

the problem is Im running manjaro and afterburner is windows only right? because I really dont need it to be running at full capacity. as long as it isnt the hd6450 1GB card that is in it right now

There are guides out there that should help you modify the power limit. I'll leave some articles below

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-set-nvidia-gpu-power-limit-nvidia-smi/131467/2

https://gist.github.com/abelardojarab/c2eea9d72342f7ade381c929edeb83fc

[TwilightRavens]

11 minutes ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

I wouldn't recommend using the stock power supply, they're not exactly firecrackers like some PSU's but they were never meant to be used with high power gpus. I'd imagine if the GPU doesn't get enough power it clocks down. Also you don't need to change BIOS settings to limit power consumption, programs like MSI Afterburner allow you to do that pretty well.

I don’t think they clock down if they don’t receive enough power, or at least in my case they don’t. I had a LGA 775 build with an overclocked QX9650 4GHz (basically consumed way north of 300W under load) and a R9 290X (which at stock is a 295W card) and a 600W 80+ psu and whenever it would exceed the 600W it would trip ocp on the psu and just restart the system, it worked fine other than that but its not fun having a random reboot in the middle of a game. Though this I’m not sure what will happen as mine was from a too low of wattage PSU rater than a PCI-E slot rated for 35W, but if I had to guess the same thing in theory would happen.

[Mr spoon sheep]

4 minutes ago, AndreiArgeanu said:

There are guides out there that should help you modify the power limit. I'll leave some articles below

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/how-to-set-nvidia-gpu-power-limit-nvidia-smi/131467/2

https://gist.github.com/abelardojarab/c2eea9d72342f7ade381c929edeb83fc

Thank you so much! I get this isnt a definite fix but if this doesnt work I can do no more

[Mr spoon sheep]

5 minutes ago, TwilightRavens said:

I don’t think they clock down if they don’t receive enough power, or at least in my case they don’t. I had a LGA 775 build with an overclocked QX9650 4GHz (basically consumed way north of 300W under load) and a R9 290X (which at stock is a 295W card) and a 600W 80+ psu and whenever it would exceed the 600W it would trip ocp on the psu and just restart the system, it worked fine other than that but its not fun having a random reboot in the middle of a game. Though this I’m not sure what will happen as mine was from a too low of wattage PSU rater than a PCI-E slot rated for 35W, but if I had to guess the same thing in theory would happen.

I'll keep it in mind Im thankfull for every reply!

[TwilightRavens]

3 minutes ago, Mr spoon sheep said:

I'll keep it in mind Im thankfull for every reply!

I mean it won’t hurt anything to try it as is, worst case like i said would be (since you are on linux) would be either a kernel panic, random reboot, black screen crash or it’ll work fine, if the former happens then the best you can do is trying to enforcing a stricter power limit like stated above, though that’s what you’d be limited to since you can’t mod NVIDIA’s Pascal bios directly like you could with Maxwell and earlier cards.