Prvrt

Hey all,

I was just wondering before I make my purchase, if a XFX Radeon HD 4770 would work with my 375W PSU, it's from DELL and I hear they underrate their power supplies so it might be somewhere in the 400s hopefully. It's been running my power guzzling 256mb x850 PE and after checking some wattage consumption charts it shows that they are pretty close in terms of wattage. Also, I hear that the 4770 is great for low power consumption. I'm running a Intel E6600 2.4 Ghz Dual Core with 2GBs of RAM.

What are your thoughts? Does anyone have success stories with DELL PSUs? They reason I want this card is because of the power to performance ratio as well, because i'm not interested in upgrading my PSU as i'll just replace the whole PC another year or 2 down the line with the new i7 stuff. I'm just looking for a temporary boost in performance.

P.S: My PSU has only 1 6-pin connector, but I believe that's all I need?

Thanks.

floop12444

Absolutely no way.
ATI recommend a 450W but i would recommend a 600W at least.
And it would also have to be a good brand such as a Corsair or OCZ.
Something like this one : OCZ 600W

Prvrt

Here they are running the card on what seems to be a 410W PSU
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...-hd4770_5.html

I know you guys with your 600-1000 watt power supplies think this is unreasonable but people do run powerful cards without the megaton PSUs.

emosun

Yea and there machines die out in a few months due to over taxing a cheap power supply. Dell uses the worst quality power supplies and if you run the card on it , it's going to burn out quickly. The actual power requirement for a 4770 would be a 550w or higher quality unit with 26 amps on the 12v rail and an 80+ certification.

floop12444

Heres the link to the official xfx website which states it needs at least a 450w: http://www.xfxforce.com/en-us/produc...es/4770.aspx#2

If you want to run this card properly without it malfunctioning, then you are going to need PSU larger than 410W. For sure.

Prvrt

Thanks for the comments guys, I was looking around and found this calculator:
http://www.extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine
with my current setup with the x850 xt PE, it shows that at peak I need a 353W PSU, I switched to the 4770 video card and it lists it at 324W required

It just seems to me like the x850xt PE has been more taxing on my system then a 4770 would be. I know the calculator isn't 100% correct but maybe somewhat close.

What do you guys make of this?

Note: I don't overclock or have a liquid cooling setup, it just very basic.

floop12444

It seems to me like you wan't to get a high end graphics card without a high end PSU.
Simply put, if you don't upgrade your PSU your graphics card will not function properly and you may even damage some parts of your computer.
You simply cannot "calculate" this kind of stuff with an online calculator.

wrench97

Add 30% to the result the calc, gives you to make up for long term capacitor aging and to get the usage in the 70% range, you want the system to run long term not just for a year right.
OEM's tend to power a unit only to ensure it makes it out of the warranty period using the installed components. Card manufacturers tend to give low power requirements on new cards and raise the estimates over time so as to not thwart card sales.
353 + 106 = 459 in the 500w class the Corsair 550vx or the Seasonic S12's are best 2 picks

Under powering only leads to excess noise, heat and shorter component life.

Prvrt

Thanks for the comments guys, I still have 1 more question, I have a P965 motherboard and I'm not sure but I think they are PCI-Express 1.0... do you guys know if a 4770 will run on 1.0 and if it does will the performance be bottle-necked? I believe its a 2.0 card isn't it?

wrench97

The cards are backwards compatible, on anything but the latest high end card you won't see the difference.