Hi, I recently bought a Dell Inspiron desktop, but I wanted to play Company of Heroes and World in Conflict. I understand that I can probably use a lower end graphics card for Company of Heroes, but I don't want to bother with getting a new graphics card down the line to play more recent titles. Here are the stats for my desktop: Inspiron 530,Intel Pentium Conroe Dual Core Processor E5200(2.5GHz,800FSB) with 2MB cache 4GB DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz(expandable to 6 GB) Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100 320GB Serial ATA 2 Hard Drive (7200RPM) I know I know, its no Alienware desktop, but I only paid $250 for it =) btw-I lament everyday because I should have paid the extra $80 and got a Core 2 Duo Now the research I have done is that Graphics cards are power hungry..... So I have to get a new power supply(my current power supply is only 300 W). How much of a power supply would I need? Will a 550 W, work? What else do I have to change in order to install a graphics card such as the GeForce 9800
This should be in the PC Hardware forum. And you're gonna need to ascertain what kind of slots you have available on your motherboard. You're gonna need a PCIe 8x or 16x slot to run almost all new cards.
yes a 550 watt power supply will work. As far as the pci slot, the easiest way to tell is to just know what one looks like. There are probably white card slots on your motherboard. These are pci slots. A pci express x16 or pcie x16 slot is longer and often different colored. there are also short (probably 2 inch long pcie x1). If you have an AGP slot it is usually colored as well and shorter than the pcie slots. If you have some sort of graphic card already, the easiest way to tell is to go to device manger and open the display adapters tab. Right click the adapter under this and click on properties. It should tell you whether the card is in a PCI or AGP slot. hope this helps
my 9800GT says it only needs 350watts on the box, and dell powersupplies are underrated, so you could potentially run the gpu on what you have. but that would be risky. i'd reccomend getting anything above 400watts, and no, your dual core cpu will run World in Conflict just fine with that GPU. i have a very similar build except my processor is an e7200, and it plays world in conflict at very high settings very well. same goes for Company of Heroes.
another important note, i'm not up to date on what dells are packing under the hood, but you should go through the owners manuel that came with the computer to make sure it has a pci-e x16 express slot. i gamed on a dell for about 4 years, and they do suprisingly well if you have a decent GPU. for $250 bucks, that pc is a steal.
yeah, you definitely don't need a 9800 but i see why you want it. and WiC and CoH runs on my old AMD Athlon 64 3700+ so you should be fine. :) by the way, i got the same PC for $400, you're lucky.
Good news friends! I just opened up my inspiron and it has two PCI 16X slots. The reason I know they are 16X is because they are friggen long white bars Now where do we go from here troops?
I have a Studio (same thing) and it only has 1 PCI x16 not 2. Get a better power supply only so you won't need another for the future and 9800 will be tight, but it fits. The only down side is that Dell cases don't get good ventilation, so if it's possible, buy the card where air is forced back out, instead of inside.
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