The battle for mainstream graphics supremacy will enter a new phase with month, with both Nvidia and AMD's graphics unit ATI being expected to introduce their latest contenders within two weeks. And if power supply is any indication, then both products could be swimming against the green IT trend and turn out to be very power hungry.

Nvidia's and ATI's next graphics cards may be vastly different overall, but they will share some features such as 512 MB of memory (GDDR3 on the GeForce, GDDR5 on the Radeon) as well as power and cooling requirements. We recently learned that the GeForce 9800GT and Radeon 4870, both of which will aim at the sub-$300 segment, will come with two 6-pin PEG (PCI Express Graphics) connectors, each supplying 75 watts of power.

With PCI Express slot providing 75 watts of juice and the motherboard another 75 watts, there is a theoretical supply of up to 225 watts. That is quite a jump in the sub-$300 segment and it makes you wonder what the reasons may be, but we are certain that overclockers won't mind. One of key limitations for the extreme overclocking of the previous generation parts was the fact that the cards (3850, 3870, 8800GT, 8800GTS512) had only one power connector.

You can read the entire article at TG Daily.