Upgrading a prebuilt

[rambisco]

A friend of mine has an emachines et1331g-03w. The poor guy runs CS:S at 15 fps. I told him I might be able to salvage what he has, and maybe we can. All he wants to do is run CS:GO at 40+ fps on 1280x1024, low or ultra doesn't matter, it beats 640x480.

My problem is no matter how much I google around, I can't find out the wattage of the PSU or what open slots the mobo has for a GPU. He doesn't have much to spend, maybe $80. (stretchable) At first I recommended an antec basiq 350 and a radeon 6570, but with my limited knowledge of his computer and building in general, I wasn't sure if he had a PCI-E 2.1 slot or not. Maybe PCI-E's are backward compatible. I wouldn't know. All in all, I want to know if an upgraded PSU is necessary, and what graphics card can fit in there.

 

[aaab]

Why don't you open it up and have a look? That would be the best way to find out if he has PCI-E and should tell you the wattage of the PSU. Be careful a normal PSU may not fit in the case.

They are mostly backwards compatible.

If you can get an AMD HD 7750 that would probably be a very good choice. The 7750 is a very low power card.

You want to make sure he has PCI-E x16 and not just PCI-E slots. If you can open it up and take a photo. Someone on here will be able to tell ya.

 

[rambisco]

His native res is 1280x1024. The processor is a 2.7GHz Athlon X2. 6GB of RAM. That's pretty much all I know.

 

[Deemo13]

If you want, you can just open the case and look at the power supply. If it has at least 15-16a on the 12V rail I would say it would be able to run a 6670 DDR3, which are usually pretty cheap, around $60. It seems to have 6GB of RAM, so that's good.

The Athlon X2 isn't that slow of a processor. I used an X2 215 and was able to game on it and what not with a 6670 DDR5. The DDR3 is slower, but not that much.

I haven't been able to find out if the motherboard has a PCI-e X16 or not. If it does, th 6670 should run fine, as in almost all cases PCI-e is backwards compatible.

 

[rambisco]

So if you put in a graphics card with too much power draw for the PSU it wont fry or break anything? I had kind of just guessed it would.

(I'm a laptop gamer) :L

 

[RetiredChief]

emachines are NOT known for sticking a "Quality" PSU in their Box.
That said, the 6670 is a VERY low power card, so even a 250/300 Watt PSU should handle it. Would only add about 50 Watts max to current power drain.

And to answer your last question, yes, overloading a LOW quality PSU can cause damage to the system. A GOOD PSU would just shut down if current drain is to high, NOT always true for a "good" PSU, BUT much more likely with a low end PSU.