4-pin connector on my Radeon 9800 pro?

[Stephenace]

Sorry for the Newbie question in advance:

I'm changing the computer out on my arcade cabinet.  Currently there is a Radeon 9800 pro (AGP) installed and there is a four pin connector (Directly from computer power supply) plugged into the back of the graphics card.  I have a pentranic 1432 monitor.

I can't see a similar 4 pin connector on the arcadevga 5000 or most other graphics cards compatible with soft 15khz so what is this?

Since I now need a PCIe card, just want to make sure I'm buying something that's going to work for me.
 
my best guess is it's a vga signal boost of some sort but really not sure.  Appreciate help.  Thank you.

[JDFan]

THe AGP bus could only supply a max of 48.25 Watts through the AGP 3.0 bus so any card that draws more than that needed an additional 4 pin power connector to provide the extra wattage for the card - The PCI-e 2.0 slot can provide up to 75 watts where PCI-e 3.0 can provide up to 300W so most of the newer (relative to AGP) PCI-e 2.0 cards that are compatible with soft 15Khz require less than 75 watts so can get enough power through the slot thus do not have 4 pin connectors ( and those that require more than 75W have either 6 or 8 pin connectors - a 6 pin can provide an additional 75W and an 8 pin 150W in addition to the 75W the PCI-e bus provides so how many and what number of pins the card has will be determined by the amount of power the card can use + a decent overhead amount for stability )

But for your original question the reason the 9800 Pro had the 4 pin is so it could get the additional power it needed that the AGP slot could not provide.

[Stephenace]

Perfect!  Thanks for the quick response!