Recommedation for a low power graphics card

Sep 15, 2013
2
0
10,510
I recently inherited a PC which is better than my current machine in pretty much every way, the only downside being that it doesn't currently contain a graphics card. The machine in question is this:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03395973&lang=en&cc=us&taskId=110&contentType=SupportFAQ&prodSeriesId=5258508

...the main issue that I can see is that the power supply is 300W, which may preclude putting some graphics cards in. So, my question is: has anyone got any recommendations for a low power graphics card which would go well in this machine?
One other thing to mention is as far as I can tell there's no way to connect an external power supply to the graphics card, so it will have to be powered directly through the PCI-E slot. (This is what's preventing me trying the graphics card in my current machine.)

To give some idea, recent games I've been playing are Planetside 2, Total War Shogun 2* and Far Cry 3. I'm fine with not playing at absolutely maximum settings, but I'd like it to play smoothly with decent graphics.

Any advice much appreciated!

*I would have said Rome 2, but that's got fps issues of its own at the moment so probably isn't the best game to benchmark off...
 

RazerZ

Judicious
Ambassador


Edit: Nvm I thought you said you wanted to play Crysis 3. Yes 7750 is a good card, but would a 7770 or 7790 work?
 
Either the AMD Radeon HD 7750 DDR5 or the nVidia GTX 650 (not the Ti version). The GTX is marginally faster (like 2%), it consumes slightly less power (53w vs. 58w; assuming both are stock speed; not overclocked), but is also a bit more expensive. I think the lowest price I've seen which includes rebate was $90 or $95; but I don't remember seeing many rebates for nVidia cards in general. The cheapest price for the Radeon HD 7750 DDR5 was maybe $80 - $85 with rebate. Do not buy the Radeon HD 7750 DDR3 because DDR3 RAM is slow an will probably be around 20% slower than the DDR5 version.