...and now the games don't work(2)

[Grisu]

I was told the card should raise an issue with the driver and you get a little bubble on Windows saying "please plug in a molex connector to the graphics card" or similar.

same here, I had my card (Geforce Fx 5950) not plugged in to separete power. I got a message in windows that the card won't run at max performance, the system still was stable though. I just happened to have a 300$ Geforce 5200 equivalent