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best LOW power card?

DanF

DanF

DanF

Soldato
Joined
16 Feb 2004
Posts
4,980
Location
London
The company has bought us a bunch of Dell OptiPlex 980 computers with I7 860 cpu's and 8gb ram. The pc's come with ATI 4550 cards in them, is there anything worth upgrading to that only draws 40watts?

The PSU in these things is really tight, it's a 240w unit with 16A on the 12v line and 10A on the 5v line. The site lest you spec up a max of 2 x 4550 in xfire which would be about a 40w draw so that's probably our limit really. Also the PSU has no graphics card power leads so has to be mobo powered.

Grrrrr damn you Dell.
 
It's going to draw too much power, looks like 75watt is banded around or almost double the ati 5570 @ 40w.
 
wow thats a tight power draw, lol, well considering there's already a 4550 in there perhaps adding another in x-fire will be the way to go. Im sure it'll be cheaper. You could also run a program to check your power draw while running prime etc to see how much room you have to play with. Seems weird how Dell skimped on the psu in these though considering the 860 and 8gm of ddr3 dont come cheap.
 
Yeah it's pretty damn tight, the 5570 is about 3-4 times the performance to the 4550 so no point in going 4550 xfire really. Also it looks like the PSU has a non standard plug on to the motherboard which is also custom, not a reference design :s
 
Is that the Optiplex 980 DT or the Optiplex 980 SFF, If its the Optiplex 980 DT and it uses the standard ATX psu you could upgrade the psu to a cheap but decent 300-400 watt psu. Anyway why you want to change the graphics? Gaming?
 
yeah :) luckily we have an understanding boss so they are all getting their graphics upgraded. It's the 980 MT, the plug from the PSU to the Mobo is much smaller than normal, not sure if this is common or a Dell thing?
 
Wow we put a 5570 in to the case and loaded up OCCT with ATI Tool running at the same time, it lasted 17 minutes before OCCT stopped saying the CPU was hitting maximum temperatures. There's no case fans in these things and the HSF is a weird design that doesn't force all the air from the fan through the fins. Only other fan is in the PSU which was porting out some very hot air!

Can't believe Dell sells these like this as their top end desktop boxes for business.
 
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