Help me choose a card for basic rig

[Michaeljcox24]

Missis summoned me round to her Brother's house this afternoon. He's bought his son Lenovo rig from a catalogue and instantly realised it's no good for games. Sorry if I've mentioned any competitors there by the way mods.

Anyway. It's a Lenovo H30-00. I opened it up, there's no power supply. There's one PCI express slot on the motherboard so I'm assuming you can put a card in there but reading around the machine's max power is 65w so its got to be a low profile very low power entry level card.

They will buy from here. All they want is a link so they can buy the kid a card for Xmas. I said I'd fit when they bought it.

The kid plays basic games on steam like Minecraft and stuff and ain't gonna be going for 4K anytime soon. No budget as such, and no preference on green / red

 

[pmc25]

65W sounds very unlikely even on one of the low end Pentiums.

Look at the PSU. It should say its rating. I'd guess 175-200W.

Either way, probably not gonna work. You'd need a new PSU. Still ... whatever cheap low end AMD card you can find.

 

[pmc25]

Would be more prudent to sell it to someone and build a new Kaveri based system (the APU graphics will be enough) and it'll have the option of a discrete card later.

 

[Michaeljcox24]

There's no PSU. It uses a similar power supply to a laptop.

 

[rtho782]

65W, by the time you have given power for the CPU, the RAM, the SSD, etc, leaves nothing for a GPU.

That PCIe slot is for a network card at most.

This is not a gaming rig. Putting a GPU in it will fry the PSU.

Even low end GPUs that are low profile are dual slot so likely won't fit.

 

[theaterix]

Why not return it back if they just bought it??

 

[Michaeljcox24]

Seriously?

 

[theaterix]

By the looks of the interwebs, a 6450 is all you can put into it...

 

[rtho782]

Ok, I'm guessing the PC is this:

http://imgur.com/J3hG4Ot

It should fit a low profile card, physically.

The best thing that will physically fit, is this:

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/pali...ddr3-pci-express-graphics-card-gx-024-pl.html

It has about a 25W TDP.

That leaves 40W from your PSU.

It looks like your CPU is probably a Celeron J1900. That's 10W, leaving 30W.

You can give another 15W for the RAM, motherboard. Leaving 15W.

You can give the HDD 5W. Leaving 10W.

I'd strongly recommend unplugging the DVD drive entirely. Those can use quite a bit of power.

You might just be OK, with no DVD drive, as long as he doesn't plug his phone in to charge at the same time as trying to run his mouse and keyboard.

Or you might kill the PSU. Perhaps start a fire, as those little power bricks are not cooled.

And the GPU sucks anyway, so probably not worth it.

 

[Michaeljcox24]

So a lower power requirement card would be?

 

[rtho782]

It doesn't really go any lower. Any lower and you find GPUs based on old architectures and processes that use MORE power.

They don't make such weak GPUs anymore as IGPs have caught up on mainstream CPUs.