which graphics card is compatible with a Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 DVI AND a 300w supply?

[Andrew L]

Hi
"Another" ignorant m/board / graphics card question I'm afraid.
New system: Zoostorm 7877-0095 i5 3330 @3.0 8Gb running W7 but with a 300w power supply only. Hooked up to an old monitor @1600x900 resolution. Windows Exp rating 4.1 currently.

My 14yr has discovered Steam and wants to spend £200 of his hard-saved on a new monitor and graphics card. We have plumped on an Ilyama E2278HD but I am struggling to find out which cards will fit on our motherboard and operate on our 300w supply.
Although I can see it has an PCI Express 3.0 16 single slot, the cards we have been looking at AMD Radeon HD 7770 or 7850 both need 500w minimum and are "dual width".

New power supply or older graphics card?

I have already fitted a wireless dual band Broadband receiver which is working well, (its not on the PCIe slot!).

H/We'd be very grateful for any advice
Many thanks
Andrew and Scott Linney

 

[CraigN]

Most mid-tier GPUs are going to demand at least require a 400+ Watts on your PSU. You would have to go to a low-tier GPU to squeak by with a 300W PSU. nVidia says the minimum PSU for a GeForce GT 640 would be about 300W, so you might be able to find one of those on the cheap, and as long as he's not playing any overly demanding games, it'll squeak by.

Otherwise, if you want to get something like the 7770 or 7850, you're going to need the bigger power supply first.

 

[Andrew L]

Thanks for this.
Ok with reliability and quietness a priority, over outright performance and not wanting to unbalance the computer, what would you recommend in terms of power supply (wattage and make/model) and gpu?
He is currently playing Frontline 2 (I think that's what its called) on Steam online which means he is limited to <3Mbps because of the wireless link.
Hope this makes sense,,,
Andrew

 

[CraigN]

I'd say if you clear 500W-550W, you should be solid for any kind of mid-tier graphics card you want to put in there. Corsair, PC Power and Cooling, and XFX are all good PSU makers, I'm sure someone else could recommend more. Someone more experienced might know some metrics on loudness/quietness.

Tom's did a review on some cheap PSUs recently. These two articles might help:
Part 1: Four Cheap 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supplies, Reviewed
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/power-supply-review-80-plus-bronze,3568.html

Part 2: Four Cheap 80 PLUS Bronze Power Supplies, Reviewed
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/power-supply-review-80-plus-bronze,3587.html

 

[Andrew L]

Yes, thanks. I was just reading it!!
OK, final question. Given my motherboard and assuming I am able to swap to an appropriately sized power supply, what would be the best gpu to look at, given the limitations of the rest of the system (I'm wondering about future proofing) ie would a HD 7850 make the system be worth stretching to or should I go for the HD 7770?

Thanks for your time
Andrew

 

[CraigN]

I like to use Anandtech (Don't hurt me Tom's! ) for their quick&easy benchmark tool. Tom's has some more in-depth charts at the top, but, when I need just a quick baseline to make a recommendation.

http://anandtech.com/bench/product/778?vs=777

The 7850 beats out the 7770 by a pretty good margin (20-30 fps higher) in most games. I'd say go ahead for that one if you're willing to spend the money, it'll certainly last you longer than the 7770 will. The i5 3330 isn't the fastest i5 intel has, but it's no slouch either, and your motherboard has PCIE3.0, so you won't be bottlenecking the graphics card any with your current hardware setup.

 

[Andrew L]

Craig
Many thanks for your time and expertise.
Very much appreciated
Andrew

 

[SolidStateBeard]

I have got the same motherboard this is my set up and it plays bf4 on medium,full resolution @ 48fps. Power supply is important but they are so cheap and they aren't any noisier I fact the one I got is quieter! here is my rig.

Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 DVI motherboard
EZCool 650watt PSU + blue LED kit
Intel core i5-3330 CPU @ 3.20GHz
8GB DDR3 RAM @ 1333MHz
128GB SSD
1TB HD
MSI nVidia GeForce GTX 650 OC Edition 1GB DDR5

You can pick up the card for around £75 from dabs but make sure it's the OC edition. Has a faster memory clock speed from factory.

 

[Andrew L]

Dear Solidstatebeard,
Ta muchly for this.

In the end we went for:
Corsair CX600 Modular PSU
HD 7850
Ilyama screen

and it is fab. Took about 90mins of nervous fiddling around to fit the PSU new cables, then the new GPU as I had to move the wireless broadband card and then the power connectors(?), so I was very surprised to find it all just worked and, touch wood has done ever since.
Windows Exp score now 5.9 and the only fly in the ointment is an occasional glitch where once logged onto PlanetSide2 it flips out and defaults to the screensaver. It will then continue to do this about every 90s. Very annoying if you are in the middle of a battle!!
The usual fix is to restart the whole computer but very very occasionally this doesn't work.

Thanks again
A