What is the best graphics card for a 300W PSU?

January 3, 2012 7:10 AM

I'm looking to beef up the graphics card on my Shuttle XPC but I'm limited to a 300W power supply, a single slot PCI-Express and a budget of under £100 (~$160). What cards would you recommend?

I've got a 4GB Core2Duo (2.5Ghz) Shuttle SG31G2 with a Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 running 64-bit Windows 7. It seems to work pretty well.

I'd like to beef up the graphics card a bit since the 3650 is getting a little old but I don't want to change the PSU for three reasons:

1. I plan to move the box to being an HTPC in a couple of years time, where a 500W PSU would be overkill.
2. I don't really want to spend too much money because I'm not a massive gamer.
3. Shuttle don't make a 500W PSU which is documented as being compatible for my model.

I know very little about graphics cards so have been using the December Tom's Hardware Guide as a reference point. The problem is that the key ones it recommends (Radeon HD 5670 and 6670) look fantastic but cannot be used because they need a PSU of 400W or greater and/or they aren't a single slot card.

I appreciate that these limitations mean that I'm not going to be able to get the fastest, latest and greatest card known to mankind - but to be honest, I'm just looking for a card which is:

1. A single slot PCI-Express
2. Works with a 300W PSU
3. Is (ideally) under £100.
4. Is significantly better than my existing HD 3650.

Can anyone make any recommendations?

posted by mr_silver to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

The 6670 requires a 400W PSU? Really? I just installed one in my own box and not only is it an extremely low-power card, it doesn't even need a separate power connection.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 8:17 AM on January 3, 2012

Not only is the 6670 superior to 3650 in terms of performance, it actually has a lower power consumption as well.
posted by Unhyper at 8:30 AM on January 3, 2012

Response by poster: According to this AMD page, the 6670 needs a 400W PSU. This page from XFX also recommends 400W. The Asus page doesn't list requirements and I discounted the Sapphire version as it's a dual slot card. Oddly, I've just checked and my little old HD 3650 is documented here on the AMD site as needing 400W!

Is there somewhere else I should be looking for realistic power drain requirements?
posted by mr_silver at 9:04 AM on January 3, 2012

There's a thingy on the Nvidia page which lets you select cards based on your power supply, which could give you some leads. For reference I have a GeForce 450 GTS which I could swear only requires 300W but the Nvidia specs page says 400W. Maybe different manufacturers fiddle with their cards to make them use more/less power, even if the "vanilla" GPU claims to require something else?
posted by tumid dahlia at 2:32 PM on January 3, 2012

Oh and as a blind guess I would say that a bulk of the power required by the card would be used for the fan on the board. So by that rationale, a smaller fan (or bigger heat sink) would, possibly, theoretically require less power...maybe?
posted by tumid dahlia at 2:34 PM on January 3, 2012

Response by poster: Thanks for all your help so far.

The website that tumid dahlia pointed out was useful and a shame that AMD doesn't have one either. Interestingly if I set my limit to only 300W then it offered up a selection of fairly underpowered cards.

According to here, the 3650 has a power draw of 112W idle and 235W full load. By comparison, the 6670 (reviewed here as the 5770 which is the same but minus the Blu-ray 3D decode support, according to here) has a power draw of 98W idle and 207W full. Which, as Unhyper mentioned, means that (unless I'm very much mistaken) getting a 5570 will mean I draw 14W less when idle and 28W less with a full load.

However, this website claims that the 6770 actually draws 108W to the 78W for the 3650, or rather 38% more power!

So now I'm confused ... does the 3650 draw more power than the 6770 or not?
posted by mr_silver at 3:19 PM on January 3, 2012

I'm confused too. It could be that each of those sites used a different reference card (that is, cards with the same GPU but from different manufacturers).

Have you considered upgrading the power supply in your Shuttle? It looks like you can only bump it to 350W but that would give you a little extra breathing room.

That said, in my experience (so that's the disclaimer, there) an underpowered PSU won't actually ruin a card that needs more juice. The card just won't work. Lots of places have returns policies. So...maybe just bite the bullet and get the card you want and just give it a whirl?
posted by tumid dahlia at 6:02 PM on January 3, 2012

Response by poster: I managed to get hold of a single slot 6670 (which is pretty rare) and it unfortunately didn't fit into the Shuttle case. The problem was that the card plus the fan came out at 20mm thick and the case could only cope with something up to about 15mm.

I'm still hunting...
posted by mr_silver at 8:27 AM on August 5, 2012

Best answer: In case anyone stumbles upon this post in the future, it turned out that the biggest sticking point in getting a graphics card for this Shuttle wasn't any of the things I'd listed in my question - but actually making sure the card wasn't so wide that I couldn't get the case on.

In the end, my hand was forced when the 3650 broke and so I ended up with the only thing that was 15mm and would fit - which turned out to be a ATI Radeon HD 5450.

It's better than the 3650 in the fact that it's fanless (so silent) and comes with a HDMI connector. However it doesn't appear to be any more powerful than the 3650, probably slightly worse.

If you're not limited by space then the single slot 1GB or the dual slot 2GB Radeon 6670 would have worked just fine given the original conditions I listed.
posted by mr_silver at 3:20 PM on August 26, 2012