Powercolor or Sapphire?

I'm currently planning to put a graphics card in my crappy pc and my choice has come to the Radeon HD 6450 as I'm quite sure anything else would be overkill for it.

Sapphire:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102933

PowerColor:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131398

Now I don't know which brand to buy they are completely identical as far as I'm aware (Note: I can't buy them from Newegg they are only there for reference ) the Sapphire one seems to be more popular compared to the PowerColor and opinions about it look better too.

The trick is that from where I can buy it they are not identical in price. The PowerColor one is about 10$ cheaper compared to the Sapphire one which makes me suspicious.

So any opinions about the two brands or which one I should go for?

 

Well from reading the reviews at newegg, it looks like the powercolor one has worse overheating issues than the sapphire.

But may I instead recommend the competitor's card? Same newegg price.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130815

 

Of course
I wanted to get one with passive cooling but I see there's a passive version.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125427

Now to the pondering mobile!

 

If you want passive cooling you simply must have good ventilation in the case. And remember that the convection coefficient is proportional to the velocity, not the volume of air. So lots of slow moving air is not as good as a tiny fan buzzing at Mach speed to blow air fast over the components in question. But the faster the air, the more noise too.

That said, the models with a tiny fan will always remain cooler than the true passives. But I favor Gigabyte brand over all the others listed at the moment. (ASUS is what I stick with.)

 

In all honesty I have no idea about the ventilation and how my current case fares with it. The only reason I wanted a passive is that I don't trust the fans on cheap video cards so I thought a passive might be less hassle.

 

So long as it is a good brand, it will have a good fan. Gigabyte and Asus have some of the best. Powercolor also has some very good ones. Sapphire not as much, but they are good enough in most cases.

 

How does it affect a fan if it has to work upside down? (besides it blowing the air downwards )

I've read that pcie v2.1 cards have trouble with pcie v1.1 mobos so that means that our sole competitor is the gt 610!
I have to get out my ruler to measure what fits in my case as I'm still eyeing that passive because it's on sale but it has some humongous metal pieces attached to it.

 

By the standard PCIe is supposed to be fully backward compatible. I would not worry one bit about what version the card is.

And the direction the fan blows will always be directly against the heatsink over the GPU on the card, so how it is positioned does not matter much if any.

If space is an issue, get a low profile card of any sort, but believe me that one with a fan is almost always better. You can manually set the fan speed to whatever you think is best. Just watch the temperature until you are accustomed to the temperature it operates at.

Despite massive evidence that suggests that GPUs work fine up to 100 Celsius, I think they should never be left to exceed 70C even for a moment. The hotter they get, the more energy is required to do the same work, and thus the hotter they get as a result. I try to keep mine from exceeding 50C ever while idle, and 60C while gaming hard. To do this I manually set my fan speed higher before I start any GPU utilizing game.

 

Yeah and it is but the cards are not necessarily.
http://www.overclock.net/a/the-final-answer-to-the-controversial-pcie-x16-version-compatibility

I'm already looking at low profile cards but as I have to put them in upside down the passive one might be too big in height so yeah that might be another plus for actives.

I don't plan on intentionally frying video cards so thanks

Speaking of frying a 250 w psu can handle the gt 610 right?

 

A 250 is woefully inadequate for most GPUs. And the 610 page says it requires a 300 watt, but that likely depends more on how much your CPU draws too. If you underclock it a bit you can probably get it to work just fine on a good 200 watt PSU.

What CPU do you have? How much RAM, and how many mechanical drives do you have?

A quad core Phenom 2 usually draws about 100-150 watts by itself. A dual core of the same exact specs usually draws 100. (I know, sometimes they draw every bit as much power despite not using half the die. You can expect no more than 30 watts of draw for the motherboard itself in most cases. No more than another 30 for the fan(s).

And about 15 each for mechanical drives, but this can be a real spike if you have a half dozen drives without the "Staggered Spinup" optimization used by most good SATA drives so long as you use AHCI. However, note that this is a BIOS feature and many systems do not support it.

One they are spun up to speed, the drives draw a minimal amount of wattage.

A cheap 420 watt Corsair PSU will cost about 30-40 USD, and would be a worthy buy if you doubt your PSU can handle everything you have loaded on it. You are better off by far with a bit of extra wattage on the PSU as it will operate cooler and last longer.

If your 250 watt PSU is a generic brand, I advise replacement ASAP. Even if you think you are doing fine with what you have. Most brands artificially inflate the wattage of the PSU so they can squeeze a few more dollars out of you for a cheap piece of trash that will burn up in a few months or less. Really. I wish I was joking on this.

So whip out a calculator and figure out how much of that 250 you are using. If you are near the 200 mark then no addon card worth using will work without a new PSU with a better wattage. Sorry, the truth hurts.

I was unaware of the PCIe incompatibilities. Thank you for the link. I will remember that.

 

I think mine's a 570W...

On the other hand it was built as a gaming rig(5 years ago *cough*), I've upgraded the RAM and the graphics card since then...

 

@Omni & Daynab
I'm not that comfortable with buying a new psu for this pc. It feels like a waste of money but if I have no other choice I will have to think it more thoroughly.

I have 1.6 GHz Celeron single core CPU I don't know anything else about it currently.
The RAM is 2x1 GB DDR2.
I only have one HDD and a DVD drive that I'm willing to unplug as I don't use it.
I also have a pcie x1 wifi adapter card but I couldn't find anything about their power consumption.

My PSU is a LiteOn (Model: PS-5251-08) doesn't seem top notch. The truth doesn't hurt it just makes me sad a bit and further complicates the situation. Damn you truth!

At least I could tell you something new not just the other way around

 

After googling around I'm fairly sure that my cpu is of the intel celeron 420 type.

Calculation:
CPU -> 35 w
RAM -> 6 w
HDD -> 20 w (?)
GPU -> 29 w
MOBO -> 30 w

That's 120 w and a parenthesised question mark without the wifi card and fans.

Edit:
Also I have just realised that my computer is the hp dx2300 in it's most basic form. I feel a bit dumb as it's plastered on it but they do/did offer it with 25 w video card as an option .

 

Well, it looks like it may just work. I know how it is to live without the means to buy what you need, much less to replace parts when they go bad.

I have been meaning to replace my keyboard and buy another HDD and replace my motherboard for ages now. (I actually made a thread asking people about keyboards and such, and eventually decided what keyboard to get, but I still have not managed to gather the petty $100 USD to buy a good quality mechanical keyboard that will outlast the next ten PCs I make.)

So the video cards linked above have a pretty good chance of running. But you may have to do some manual work if the system crashes when you play GPU utilizing games. Let me show you some of what you can do. (All on the AMD side since I do not own a Nvidia GPU.)


As you can see from the image, it is painfully easy to do. You check the enable checkbox near the top, and then set the "High Performance GPU clock settings:" to a lower value from what it defaults to. Then you enable manual fan control and set it higher than normal. (Noise is an issue, but usually 50% is loud, and enough to keep it cool under any load unless you overclock it.)

Remember that the temperature gauge is in Celsius.There is not a way to force it to Fahrenheit if that is what you find easier.

When you click apply it will attempt to do what you set it to. By underclocking it a small amount, you ensure it will use less power and will not need as much cooling. But by increasing the fan speed anyway, you keep it cooler so that it does not have as much resistance as it works.

I do not know what the default values will be on any card other than mine. Mine has always defaulted to 725 MHZ when under load.You can safely ignore the memory speed. It will regulate itself better than you can manage without hundreds of failures that result in a loss of the GPU until you reboot by cutting the power at the PSU and rebooting. And there effectively is no heat and energy problem with the RAM anyway. (That is why I did not mention memory or SSDs when we were discussing the system power above. It is trivial at most.)

One little thing I always do to eliminate extra power usage in my system is to disable *ANYTHING* I am not using. I am using a USB headset, so my onboard sound card is disabled in the BIOS. (Presuming the BIOS is coded by someone who has half a brain, this saves no less than 5 watts. A trivial amount, but I would rather not have components heating up and consuming power when unused. Note that there is no way to tell if it does or does not actually disable it.)

One little thing you can always do to help out the system is to open the case and point a fan in there and let it run. An external fan is no drain on the PSU and will help blow the heat out of the case.

I have already blabbed too much again. But I am always around if you want more crazy ideas and walls of text. Good luck!

 

Well thanks everyone especially Omni !
I ended up ordering the Gigabyte GT 610 with active cooler. Two days and it will be mine. Fingers crossed it works.

@Omni
It's not that bad I mean I have food and shelter and a way to connect to the Internet. It could be much worse. Without the Internet for example Luckily I don't need computers for hardware intensive tasks so I can consider everything above a basic machine as a shiny trinket.
I think I won't wait for it to crash but rather underclock it a bit right away. The BIOS one is also a good idea as I haven't really tampered in it.

If I have some problems with it or further questions I will post here or maybe open another thread as the title is quite obsolete so yeah thanks again.

 

One thing I should have mentioned above. Baby Steps. When under/over clocking the parts, always do so in small amounts. If I were to set my GPU that defaults to 725Mhz down to the minimum of 500, it would almost certainly crash. It sounds kinda dumb, but changing it by 5Mhz at a time is probably good. And you want the total underclock no more than 10% of the default. So if I were doing it I would underclock by 70Mhz at the most.

There are several reasons to do it this way, stability is the first. The next is the fact that shaving a few % off the speed lowers the power, but having a few more reduces the decrement as you go further.

(I.E. if I typically draw 100 watts when my GPU is running stable at 725 Mhz, and I cut it to 700 Mhz it may for example cut the power use to 80 watts. But if I cut it to 600 Mhz it may only reduce it to 75 watts. And some will argue that GPUs are made to be more efficient as the heat increases. I cannot really say for certain, but I know that everyone who ever told me this besides one person here on this forum has burned a card out by letting it get too hot.)

The conductivity and heat dissipation issues are massively complex issues. The alloys used in the GPUs and CPUs these days are practically unobtainium. And are pretty much always a "trade secret". So the efficiency cannot be easily described for any one card ever unless you have the tools to test it in a variety of conditions.

But I have had and used my Radeon 5850 since March of 2010. It has never had any problems and I am still in love with it. Dollar for dollar it would cost me more today to get an equivalent card of the more modern lines. (And it is a PCIe 2.1card, being used on a PCIe 2.0 slot.So your link above really told me something I had no idea of.)

My card draws no more than 151 watts according to AMD. But I disable antialiasing in every game I play, and I wager that cuts the workload in half or more.

Dear Furry Feline Overlords! Someone hit me in the head before I continue blabbing!

 

Take a look. This is a great deal!
https://slickdeals.net/permadeal/88820/newegg-corsair-cx430-v2-430w-power-supply-cmpsu430cxv2

It is a Corsair 430 watt PSU for $16 USD with free shipping. Granted, $20 is the stupid credit card thing, but that can be used on other things.