Will a GeForce GTX 550Ti 1GB PCI-E run on a dell 460 psu?

The store site says a minimum of 450 and nvidia's site lists it as needing 400. but i want to confirm my 460psu is enough before i move forward. Also I've no interest in overclocking so that wouldn't be an an issue. thanks for any help .

System Specs
Intel Core i7-2600
6GB DDR3-1333 RAM
2 500GB 7,200RPM Hard Drive (RAID 0)

 

Heres a link to the card page
http://www.microcenter.com/product/409617/GeForce_GTX_550Ti_1GB_PCI-Express_Video_Card_-_Refurbished

 

That Vostro was offered with the following discrete video cards:

The GTX460 has a TDP in the region of 150-160W (450W PSU recommended) but should only require ~260-290W for a complete system ... !

The GTX550Ti has a TDP in the region of 115-120W.

Conclusion: providing your PSU is still close to the as new specs, the 550Ti should be fine.

If however, the PSU has been hammered by previous overclocking (CPU or GPU), it may not be such a good idea, get a new quality PSU first - SeaSonic/XFX of 400W+ (actually, the SS360 Gold would do, it's more like a 400-420w on output).

If you don't know the history of the PC, you could play safe by getting a Radeon HD 7750 (or a similar low power draw nVidia card), they use about 60-65W.

 

Thanks for the response, The pc is about a year and a half old and i've done no overclocking on the GPU or CPU so the PSU should still be in pretty good shape. i'm currently working with a very small budget so i'd prefer not to have to buy a PSU atleast for a few months.

 

As a double-check, input your data, including the 550Ti, into this PSU calculator, add 30% for capacitor aging (final checkbox) and post back the result: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

 

The minimum is 417 and recommended is 467, so does this mean that buying the card with my current psu is unadvisable?

Edit - If So can you recommend some good upgrades from a 9600 GT (its fan died recently) that aren't as power hungry. I'm mostly just looking to run games like league of legends, starcraft 2 heart of the swarm, dawn of war 2 and diablo 3 on highish settings smoothly.

 

Hmm, maybe Dell fit a bigger PSU if you ordered a discrete card with that model.

Try plugging the Radeon HD7750 into the calculator, as I said earlier, it only uses ~60-65W or so, no need for a separate power feed from the PSU to run it.

 

i'm not ordering from dell i'm buy from a store called microcenter and the tests with the 7750 are 330 minimum and 380 recommend.

 

I was (badly) trying to suggest that if the Vostro was originally ordered with the GTX 460 option, Dell may have automatically upgraded the PSU fitted.

My calculations suggest that your old GT 8600 is right in the same power consumption bracket as the HD 7750, do your calculations bear that out?

A temporary alternative (until you can stretch to a decent PSU) might be to underclock (to 2.5-3GHZ ?), that would have almost no gaming hit and probably no discernible hit in normal usage (the GPU would limit gaming) but save 11-30W, which should put you into the safe zone.

 

Cool, i think i'm going to go with 550 ti and underclock it a bit. But to be honest i have no idea how to underclock. Does the nvidia control center support this or do i need a different program?

Thanks for all your help so far its very much appreciated.

 

If you're going with the Ti and underclocking, you'll have to go a long way down, check by using the overclock calculator, left column, and recalculate the wattage after each change. I don't know how far you can drop the core voltage, I'd risk .05 - .1V (but I'm not much of a 'clocker anyway).

Over/under-clocking is best done from within the BIOS, which may be somewhat limited as it's an OEM

 

Just to be clear i didn't mean im not running a dell vostro, i'm running an xps 8300 with 460 watt psu. Sorry if i wasn't clear about that .

Here's a link to the exact pc im using
http://www.microcenter.com/product/373551/XPS_8300_Desktop_Computer

Would you still advise underclocking?

 

Ah, thanks for pointing that out to me, I'd got hold of the wrong end of the stick!

In that case, the 8300 was offered with a HD5770 - roughly the same power draw as the Ti; if it were mine, I'd risk the Ti for a few months

 

Thanks and apologies for wasting your time i should've a bit more clear about what pc i was running.

 

No worries, and no need to apologise; even if you'd put full hardware details in the OP, there's no guarantee that my brain would have correctly interpreted what my eyes saw ^^

 

If you don't mind i have one last question which is how much an improvement is the GTX 550 TI over the 9600 GT which was my previous card as i said. I run a 1600by900 resolution and i mostly play games such as league of legends, starcraft 2, diablo 3, company of heroes and the NBA 2k series. Will i be able to run them with high-medium settings? Also out of curiosity will the card run Battlefield 3 decently?

 

It'll be a good step up; not sure on those games but when I went from a 9800GT to a HD5770 (a smaller step than yours), the performance difference was obvious; you should be able to run most games a notch higher than before, any that were struggling should work fine. Being able to run in DX11 is another bonus.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+9600+GT
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+550+Ti&id=16

 

Ok sounds good and thanks again.