New VidCards but no single power leads?

[jack_mehoff]

I'm RMA'ing a broken MSI 6800, but I don't know what I'm going to do when I get the new one. My 430W Antec power supply doesn't have any single molex leads coming out of it. They're all multi-leads. There are a couple of single-lead with weird ends (thin, flat plugs, that look like big versions of the end of a cell phone power plug) but I have nothing that takes that kind of input.

Will I be able to power a 6800 off of one branch of one of the molex leads? Are there converters to change one of the weird leads to a molex lead?

[fishybawb]

Just power the card off a branch that doesn't have anything else attached to it. When people say "single molex", they mean one that's not got a splitter attached to it which is then used to connect more than one device to the same plug.

[BadDriver]

Jack, it depends on the rest of your system really. The funny plugs you are talking about are most likely sata connectors.

A 430 watt is pushing it if you have more than one hard drive, more than one cdRom, a board that requires a 4 pin connection, etc.

It is OK to split the molex connectors, but I wouldn't split the one going to the card. I would give it it's own line.

[jack_mehoff]

Shoot. I have 3 hard drives, a DVD burner, a DVD drive, and an SB Platinum sound card that sucks power as well. Is there a way to measure how much of your available power your system is consuming? I really don't want to upgrade the power supply in addition to buying a video card. I guess I could pull one of the HD's and one of the DVD drives.

Thanks for the replies BTW.

[MadPistol]

If it's an Antec PSU, it should have probably 4 or 5 separate rails (different lines for power) that you can plug into different peripherals. If you have 6 different things that you need to plug into HDD's, optical drives, etc., it shouldn't be a problem to put all 3 HDD's on the same line. It will be able to handle it. There should be a way to route everything on to 2 or 3 lines. That should leave at least 1 line open for the video card.

Hopefully this helps out. :t

[jack_mehoff]

Looking in the open side of my comp it looks like there are 3 molex leads, one of which splits to 3 outs, one to 2 outs, and one splits to 'fan only' molex leads. Then there are three of the weird plugs which are useless to me. I think my best bet would be finding something to convert one of the unusable plugs to a molex. Maybe I could just splice the wire? But I should probably get someone with better HW knowledge than me to do that.

[Imperion1]

If its an SATA power connector you're talking about, then one of THESE (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812104555) will work. Its an SATA power convertor to a 4 pin molex.