Graphics Card question.......

I would like for someone to help me pick the best graphics card I could get with the specs for a sony vaio RB38G. I have looked at other suggestions, but they require 400 PSU, which Im not sure about on those either, so if you would like to help mention one of those would be great as well.

 

Welcome to the forum Toki

You have a pci-e X16 socket so any pci-e card is compatible,as for power requirement you will struggle only having 400w power supply.

There is no way to know how robust a power supply just by reading it's specification and there is no finite way of calculating a proper safety margin when cutting things this close power wise so I would go for any card that doesn't require it's own power connector,any card that does have it's own power connector has a higher recommended minimum than 400w by Nvidia's standards anyway and I agree. Spending more money would also be wasted due to your cpu being a bottleneck,even if you upgraded to an extreme edition in your other thread.

Such as-

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102988

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125411

If your planning to upgrade this computer to play games made in the last 4-5 years I wouldn't even upgrade it,the performance wouldn't be great to give you a idea your cpu has roughly 1/8 of the processing power of a budget I5 cpu.

 

thanks for the reply back, I have looking all over the web trying to figure this out. Im not even on a 400 watt PSU atm, I have been looking, then cross refernce chart says it is compatible, then others I dont even see my model. Sigh, Im just trying to get this computer up to the smallest of specs for todays standard I guess. Also, I want to add a 3 TB hard drive I saw, was hoping maybe the PSU would handle that with maybe the small upgrade for graphics card, I ahve also been looking at upgrading the processer, just kind of been looking at the whole thing. again, thanks for the reply back, you are the only one who has responded to anything really.

 

Your welcome

You have a sata hard drive connector so you can use any sata hard drive you wish, they will all work. Due to the age of the hardware and using windows xp you may not see all of the space available, your bios may limit the size it finds to 2.5TB and if you use it as your operating system drive it will limit it to 2.0TB.

Connecting it as a secondary and using it as a large storage drive is the best option and you can use all the space for that I'll link you to this guide-

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/11/04/how-to-use-3tb-hard-drives-on-windows-xp/

There is negligible extra power consumption from a single extra hard drive,5-10 watts you should still be fine still fine adding one of those cards and a single hard drive.

Is your power supply 305W? Then yes definitely go with a card without a power connector if you still wish to upgrade or seriously consider a power supply upgrade

 

Is there anyway you could possibly guide me as to which PSU I should consider, higher or middle end. I wold like something that is pretty trusted, also your opinion on what kind of card to get? Im on an ATI Radeon 300, so I was looking at the ATIs, yet you are saying Nvidia. I would greatly appreciate it since you are the only person basically replying back to me. I just want to be able to look at the uggestiongs. thnks again.

 

The problem is if you install a video card that's much faster than the two I linked to you will be severely bottlenecked by your cpu making the upgraded power supply and video card pretty fruitless.

I linked to two nvidia and ati,both have similar performance and draw similar amounts of power and both support all the latest features such as dx11,hdmi,hdcp.

The wattage of the power supply depends on the video card a few good brands are antec,cooler master,corsair,enermax,ocz,xfx, any of these quality brands with the recommended wattage for the video card you choose should work great.

May I ask what your goal is in upgrading? The only reason really to upgrade the video card is to play games and the best you can hope for with this system is to play games from 3-4 years ago,you will not be able to play modern titles smoothly.

 

the computer i got was on the cheap. Just seemed to be really slow. I just wanted to try to get things on a little better curve with todays standards with what I could achieve with this machine. I know I want get anywhere close, but still to just try to step it up. I decided to use this machine for a media center, so the extra hard drive is for storage, plus i have been trying to do video editing and the games thing, I dont really want to get anything all that new, but would still like to get closest to capable if at all possible, which it doesnt seem like will happen. I would still like to try to get it upped if possible, but not if there isnt really that much difference as it does seem kind of wasteful.
Also, Im on windows 7 32 bit, not windows xp, sorry