| Power connectors |
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Newer video cards require more and more energy. If years ago they did not even need any cooling at all, today they need large, heavy-duty coolers. And where do they get this extra power from? Every powerful card has at least one power plug, because motherboard can not provide enough power through PCI-e slot. These plugs can be simple 4-pin molex-es on older cards, 6-pin PCI-e power plugs on newer ones or even 8-pin PCI-e plugs on the most power consuming products.
Usually graphics cards warn you on boot, if the power cables are not plugged in correctly, but I have come across some cases online in which video cards gave no warning at all. People were dealing with extremely slow performance on fast video cards and it took them a lot of time to find out the cause - power cables were not plugged into their video cards (second power connector on Geforce 9800 GX2 for example) and because of that they always stayed in low power mode even when playing 3D games. That means, that cards did not switch to performance 3D frequencies even though they should. That is why it is wise to open up your case and check the power cables when you are having problems with a new hardware configuration and you can not fix it with software changes and driver updates. It really is a very rare situation, because card usually tells you about this problem, but if it does not, it can be a very hard problem to spot, because we primarily blame software.  |
