Upgrading a PSU

Dresden

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Oct 4, 2005
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i have a crappy ass HP, and i don't have enough yet to make myself a sic custom honey. i have an ATI 800XL, and it runs fine with the stock 300W PSU, but i want more muscle, and yet i fear i'm stuck with my PSU, which would also leave me with no options to upgrade my VGA. Any solutions??
 
Is your X800XL AGP or PCIe? What are the rest of your system specs? You thinking on upgrading to a 7800 series from the X800XL? I would think that you would be bottlenecked by the rest of your system if you upgraded the vid card at this point. If your not gaming at high res with all the eye candy, then you won't see a huge perf gain from a vid card upgrade anyway.

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Dresden

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Oct 4, 2005
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good point. my system has PCIe, 3.4GHz HT Intel, 2GB of PC3200 OCZ Platinum RAM, 17" Sony HDM Monitor which supports only up to 1280x1080 res. i just started gaming about two months ago, cause i got this HP for like 300. It works great for being what it is, probably cause i've put a little more into it, but I'm starting to get bored of it, lol. Do you think i would have to go completely custom for a more powerful graphics solution minus an SLI/CROSSFIRE option? Could i just upgrade my PSU(if possible), vid card, and monitor? probably not, huh?
 
$300 for that rig?! Are you sure it wasn't Hot?

That system should easily handle any modern game. What aspect of your gaming experience do you not like?

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Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
Probably the Intel <b>EXTREME</b> graphics! Yeh yeh, he's got an X800XL, but when he said HP I just had to throw that in.

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The short answer is maybe. You could probably get another PSU from HP, but it would be more expensive and maybe not as good as a PSU you could buy yourself. Read below for the reasoning on maybe...

Newer HPs should be using PSUs with a standard wiring config that is compatible with ATX12V, but you should verify with HP that the wiring for their systems is non-proprietary before swapping PSUs.

Once you have verified that it is safe to swap PSUs, then you can purchase another PSU to install in that system. Measure the dimensions of your PSU and make sure that whatever PSU you get will physically fit in your case. Also make sure the rear layout of the PSU matches the rear of your case - if not, then you may have to mod the case to get the new PSU installed. An easy way to verify rear layout is looking at the pics on websites like newegg.com.



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