About heat control and that

I have a new PC (new to me, anyway).

It's a HP dc7600, Core 2 Duo, 3Gb RAM and an empty PCI-E slot.

Of course I NEED to get a PCI-E Gfx card. Absolutely have to. Can't function without one.

I'm considering an ATI HD 3850, but, as it's a business PC, rather than a gaming PC, I'm a little concerned about cooling. It has only the one extractor fan for the casing, will this be a problem?

Oh, and the PSU is 385 watt, is that likely to be enough?

Hope you can help.

Cooling wouldn't be as much of an issue as the power supply ... 385W ... if it's good quality ... might do the job, but i wouldn't trust it.

Thanks for the quick reply.

Well, it's HP so I'm more inclined to think it's good quality rather than poor quality, but still, relieved if that's going to be the only possible problem...

Curious though, if a PSU isn't up to the job or powerful enough, what symptoms will occur?

I'll have a look at some 450w PSUs in the meantime.

well you should also factor in that if the pc is doing no gaming at all, or no workloads that are gunna require a powerful gpu (ie GPGPU applications) then why bother tossing an HD3850 in a pc that would function no better than a $20 7200GS would work just as well.

But if you have the card already and just wanna use it in there, than I would share the same concerns as weevil. Cooling shouldn't be a big problem actually as desktop work is gunna leave the gpu idle, AMD has added the same PowerPlay technology that they use on laptop GPUs to the HD3850, so at idle its going to reduce down in clock speed, and thanks to its 55nm manufacturing process its idle power consumption is gunna be on par with the 8600GT, and at full tilt its gunna be on par with the 8600GTS.

So power and heat shouldn't really be HUGE concerns since the card is hardly the power sucking/heat blowing cards that we have been seeing in the past, and are about to be seeing again.
If the psu wasn't holding up though you would know. The pc may fail to boot, it may crash during heavy work loads, and symptoms like that.

But honestly, you are probably gunna be just fine. Nothing in that pc seems exceptionally hot running or power consumping, I'd be surprised to see that entire pc break 350w at full tilt even with the HD 3850. But again, if you dont need a powerful gpu, why not stick with a cheaper card that will put out less heat, consume less power, require less cooling, and only set ya back $20

Stang as always has the Vid Card query wrapped up.

But I'm a little concerned about your PSU if you decide to go with a higher end card. I agree with Stang that the pc shouldn't break the 350w mark but if your psu isn't up to the job then you will come across problems.

For example I had a 600w generic PSU thinking it would deliver the goods but in fact it was actually worse than a 400w old Tagan which I had in a spare pc.

It's not so much the wattage that you need to worry about but more so a sustained output and solid rails to provide uniform distribution of power.

But if you go with Stangs recommended cheaper card then you shouldn't have any problems.

I love you guys (as I do 'Brian Y.' who helped me in my other thread "Woohoo! Finally I can go PCI-E! But which one?" over in the Video Cards forum)!

I should explain my intended uses. This PC won't generally be for dull office work. I have a PC at work for that. Sure sometimes I'll be using it for managing fantasy baseball teams, or arguing with people on Usenet about Yes albums but usually that kind of activity will be done on my laptop while I sit in front of the TV.

This PC is my leisure PC. I'll be using it for Oblivion (which I previously played using a Sapphire Radeon 9600XT - which was OK at medium resolutions except when there was a fight or some such then it would stagger), Thief 3, Tomb Raider Anniversary.

And I'm sure I'll find some yet meatier games to play with whatever I end up with (I'm still hoping for a Thief 4 to come out and correct all the failings in Thief 3).

The other main activity will be music making with CuBase but obviously that's more of a sound-card and CPU issue than a gfx accelerator application (Hmmm, is there a sound cards forum here) .

So, although I'm not wedded to the idea of spending a lot of money, with my birthday coming up on Saturday I'd quite like the idea of getting something that isn't lagging behind the rest and/or found in the bargain bin (as was my Radeon 9600XT). Hence my interest in something like the 3850 which presumably will not just play the game, but will up the resolution, details and shadows while it's at it, and give me a certain level of 'future proofing' - and still only cost about £70-£80! Nice!

Does this ramble change anything that you've said (Weevil, Stand and IceDragon)?

BTW, anyone had any luck getting (Ubuntu) Linux working with these cards?

Ok well yes that does change things a little, I assume ice and weevil were under the same assumption as me after reading your first post that you had no intention of gaming at all on this system. If you wanna play games and specifically the ones you pointed out, the HD3850 is currently the best value around aside from the occasional hot deal on a 9600GT, which will typically be about 10-15% faster. As you can see here, specs wise both cards are pretty competitive, and most benchmarks will visualize this for you, such as the ispeed charts over at Digit-Life. For the most part both cards are on the same performance level, and will just fight it out with a few fps difference, but at times you may see one card in 10-15fps advantage.
Personally I'd stick with the 3850 given its power figures pricing, and its current advantage of being able to run Folding @ Home for our dev team

AS for the PSU side of things, if your system is somehow limited by what power supply it can use, you can purchase 5.25 in drive bay style power supplies, such as this or this, and these are independent of your main power supply can be used just to power your video card(s). But of course if you can use other power supplies in your system, then this is really not the best approach as that $70 can get you a solid unit that wouldn't have any trouble with your system. But as for high quality and affordable power supplies, I have had a lot of success with the Rosewill RP500, found here, which is a good 500w unit for only $45. Ive used about a dozen of these and never had one fail and they all hold up very well. I don't see any problems powering what you have off a unit like this.

As for linux, yes ATI provides even the latest catalyst 8.5 release drivers for the linux environment. Installation shouldn't be too complicated, but as always the more you know about linux the smoother its likely to go.

And happy (early) birthday

I love it when I get up in the morning and find someone's replied to posts I left just before I went to bed.

Good stuff there, Stang, thank you. Now to find how many of the items you mentioned are available in the UK.


Thanks, geez!

Upon re-reading my first post I can see why. What I meant was that the PC was designed for business. Anyway, no harm done.

As for Rosewill PSUs, it doesn't look like they're available in the UK so I'm having to make this bit up. Which is made more complicated by the fact that the optical drive is IDE but the hard drives are SATA.

With regards to PSUs, what is meant by 'rails'?

As for Folding @ Home, I'm already doing that...but as just me. Last time I looked I was just above the 10th percentile. Nice.

It is just the line that the power runs down to power the appropriate components.

The 'rails' will be seperate 3.3v, 5v &12v lines, but you only have to worry about the 12v rail.

Most new PSU's these days have 2x12v rails and some 4x12v rails to provide stable power to components to prevent overload and almost as important underpowering components.