To dream the impossible dream

[gdt]

Graphics card in the kid's Windows box used for The Sims has failed. AGP8x, low profile, DVI output -- all good so far. 210W power supply --that hurts since the worst card I can find says on the box it needs a 250W power supply. The card is the same design as the current one but the heat sink is worryingly 25% longer.

Being used to routers I hunt through all the Windows control panel stuff looking for the reported current drawn from the power supply. Nope, not instrumented. Being used to networking gear I look for the actual current draw in the card documentation rather than the recommended power supply size. Nope. No wonder the average person finds computing hard.

Looking at Dell OptiPlex GX270 on the web I find some with Nvidia Geforce 6200 cards, although these seem to be upgrades and my box has a full set of RAM and thus no headroom on the power supply. The original ship seems to have had the Nvidia FX5200 with 128MB.

Oh, and it looks like there's a known fault with some motherboard capacitors. Great :-(