Advice on Adding a GPU to my PC?
 

I have a stock (I think) Dell Optiplex 780 (old, I know). To clarify on a few things, my processer is an Intel Core Duo 2 E7500 (2.93GHz) and 4GB of ram. Can someone advise me on upgrading to a GPU? I literally don't have any Gpu in this thing, just a puny old intel chip (not even HD series its so old)

I have been wanting this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00...=ATVPDKIKX0DER
but that's expecting a bit much of all my other hardware to pull through alongside it and what not.

Main concern is those kind of stock builds have a psu barely able to power what it comes with. You'll probably need a psu upgrade as well.

That's what I thought. Thanks.

How many rails do you have? Wattage too.

Rails...?

Well my wattage is around 250 last time I checked I thnk...

Rails don't matter for adding a GPU, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

What you need to know is if you have a PCI express slot available.

Rails matter a lot. If you dont have enough amps on the rail then your screwed.

Rails will be listed on the side of the psu. You will see a list of +12v rails and the amps they can provide. Either get a psu with 1 rail with a lot of amps or psu with multiple rails.

Other things matter too like Skill suggested.

Of course, there are a couple of PCI slots that are free.

Not too sure about SLIing anything on a stock (likely propriatary and of lesser quality) OEM PSU.

Eh, the days of single vs multiple rails is kind of over. It used to be that a big ass single rail was the way to go, but nowadays it's not worth discussing. In the end the amps will give you the wattage it claims to supply.

Oh, I was thinking of something else. My bad.

I think it's the other way around now. There were regulations or whatever that prevented psus from having too many amps on one rail.

Just wanted to mention I'm not doing SLI/Crossfire.

Sorry for double posting, just want to give a little mini-bump with this.

So assuming my current psu cannot handle a single bit more hardware, and I have like 250 or so wattage, how much would my total power usage be after installing a EVGA GTX 650?

According to http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/del...-34199552.html

This motherboard has a 1.0 (total) / 0.0 (free) x PCI Express x16 - Low-profile slot the card you want is double sized and likely won't fit into a low profile area. The 235 watt PSU is definitely not qualified for any good GFX cards. You can get a decent 600-750 watt PSU for $20 to $40 . It looks like you can upgrade it to 8gb of PC3-10600 (1333Mhz DDR3) memory. I'd leave the CPU alone, improve the cooling and just see if you can overclock it a bit. Personally I'd best recommend just doing a whole new build from scratch and using that machine to hold a bunch of hard drives and use as a server.