Hey, A friend of mine has just bought a new Dell. It's a decent enough machine, i5-4460, 8GB 1600Mhz ram... The thing only has a 300W PSU though! It comes with an NVidia GT 705 graphics card, which as far as I can tell is pants. I know there are graphics cards that don't need additional power (the 750 comes to mind), but I don't know if that would be a good upgrade or what... Can anybody make a recommendation? NVidia or AMD, I don't care which... It just needs to be as good as it can be! Thanks!
Personally Id tell him to return it and build a custom machine iirc upgrading Dells is a pita, I have a vague memory that the PSUs have weird connectors on them too for the board, so upgrading the PSU might not be easy either Could be remembering wrongly, but I can remember something irritating like that
Returning it isn't an option. This guy has a very limited budget, and got this machine for £276.75 all inc. He is just going to use it as a basic home machine. Browsing the net and such like, he knows it's not great but he's not particularly interested. I wanted to be able to upgrade the graphics card for him as I know what a hard time he's going through at the moment.
750 Ti without the need of an 6 Pin would be ideal, as it draws 60w and will not have to worry about PSU issues (say if it only came with a basic 300w PSU). http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-252-EA&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1854 Do you know what rating the PSU is?
At one time, yes. Not in the last decade though. That card is complete garbage. He'd be better off with the integrated Intel graphics. The GT705 is an "OEM only" card built using a low-end mobile graphics chip. It's not even supported by NVidia at last check.
Never owned a Dell, just worked on them in a repair shop a few years back, so could have been any age
Last one I did was a 2004 Dell Dimension 2400 (the same model Dell got sued over excessive PSU failures for). Had to replace the PSU in it back in 2005 after it's 13 month old PSU failed. When my sister contacted Dell, she was told by a CS Rep that if she had bought the 2 year warranty, the PSU wouldn't have failed at 13 months. I have no respect for Dell and feel sorry for anyone that's forced to buy from them.....
Wow, stupidity at its best, was she meant to believe that they put a warranty self-destruct timer on the machines? I remember something about error LEDs on them too, having to look up different patterns, and if the CMOS battery died, the machine wouldn't even POST