Low power, low profile graphics for a Q6600

[almoststew1990]

I picked up a free Dell. I treated it to its first clean since it was new probably, painted it green and white for some reason, and as it is a SFF PC I might use it for... something. It has a Q6600 and 4GB of RAM (although I might put 6GB or 8GB in there if I can dig out extra sticks as it has four DIMM slots).

Anyway it has a PCI-E slot, with a limit of 25watts. It has a 275Watt PSU. I have been eying up AMD 7470s for £10 (27 Watts but watt the hell) which at that price I might just go for but there are a whole range of ramdom OEM GPUS; the entire 8000 series, numerous R5 210-240s; 300 and 400 series of similar naming, some of which are slower than a 7470! Does anyone have any experience or suggestions for a better one? Will this hold back a Q6600 at 1280*1024?

 

[Armageus]

Gt710 is quite a bit quicker and works in a 25w slot (I had a sff hp at one point)

Still terrible imo and will be the bottleneck miles before even a Q6600 is

 

[lichfield]

Make sure it has a 64-bit OS..otherwise no point in putting in more than 4 gigs of ram,as the system won't recognise the extra ram.

 

[almoststew1990]

Gt710 is quite a bit quicker and works in a 25w slot (I had a sff hp at one point)

Still terrible imo and will be the bottleneck miles before even a Q6600 is

Thanks, The 710 is a good shout but is perplexingly expensive so I'll probably go with the 7470 still which is readily available (seems to be literally hundreds of them).

 

[drakulton]

You could also lob in an E5450 @ 3ghz using the 771 to 775 mod, or do one of the many bsel mods to the cpu to get it to run a bit faster.

I swapped the dell fan for a couple of Zalman's, so there's cool air blown at the silent GT 730, and a noctua in the PSU, er….. and an ssd. It pootles round the internet quite nicely and quietly, and does a bit of light gaming too.

more mod pix https://www.flickr.com/photos/157373287@N03/albums

 

[almoststew1990]

That looks great! But I'm really not planning on putting that much effort into this I'll add the GPU and I might lob in a 128GB SSD using the original mounting plus an adapter (and remove the fan, if I can get the BIOS to stop whinging about no rear fan being connected) and then it'll be alright for... actually, I still have no idea what I will use it for!

I will say that I used to hate SFF Dell PCs, we had Pentium 4 PCs like this at school which gives me bad memories! However this little PC sems quite nice. Well put together in an organised chaos kind of way inside, but it works alright!

 

[drakulton]

That looks great! But I'm really not planning on putting that much effort into this I'll add the GPU and I might lob in a 128GB SSD using the original mounting plus an adapter (and remove the fan, if I can get the BIOS to stop whinging about no rear fan being connected) and then it'll be alright for... actually, I still have no idea what I will use it for!

I will say that I used to hate SFF Dell PCs, we had Pentium 4 PCs like this at school which gives me bad memories! However this little PC sems quite nice. Well put together in an organised chaos kind of way inside, but it works alright!

Thanks... I was only going to upgrade the cpu and it just kind of snowballed. It does most things I need apart from high rez flight simmage and VR which I have another box for.