video card over clock or get a new one

[gyrene81]

that 240 is an oem video card, minimum power requirement is 450watts. did you get it built by a local shop or a friend? the only way to get that video card is to pull it from a retail box unit, people sell them on ebay after they upgrade.

the motherboard is a microstar international (msi) micro-atx with the intel h55 northbridge chipset with an integrated graphics chip that supports directx10. i hope the case is a large mid tower atx case, otherwise you're going to have to take some measurements inside the case then make sure whatever video card you purchase will fit.

[danmac]

I took the PSU out and looked but couldn't find any info on it their was 3 quality control stickers though and I had a guy build it while I was in Afghanistan I think it was around 600 or so. I didn't pay top dollar so I didn't expect a super gaming pc but I'm not opposed to spending some coin to make it do what I want.I'll take some pics of the whole thing when I get off So you can see what its got. This computer is a few years old. I also want to say it's a coolmaster tower box but not sure

[Bizman]

no idea what any of this means i use this comp for only aces high and some google and youtube

It tells that your computer looks like it's not some El-Cheapo brand. It tells the model of your motherboard, which is helpful for determining possible upgrades. It tells your processor specs. A longer version would have told the model of your video card, but that's something we already know.

Very weird that your PSU has no label on it. There should be one on either side, but since you've taken it out and couldn't find any, we believe your saying there isn't one. There are a couple of clues that might help determine whether it should work with a better video card: Look at the cables. If there's a spare 4+4-pin splittable connector, maybe even with a text like "video" or "graphics" on it or on a sticker around the cable, your PSU is designed to work with a more powerful card. Some older PowerSupplies have a single square 4 pin video card connector, or a 6-pin one, the connectors in two rows on both.

[gyrene81]

oy, now i'm wondering if that power supply has a gray housing on it. no mfg and power data labels sounds like it's a used oem component, and if it is an oem part, it would be underpowered for anything resembling a medium or high end video card. it should have a label that shows power ratings in watts, volts and amps.

that system could use more ram too. 4gb on win7 64bit is low, especially for gaming. by the time that system is done booting up, it's using 900mb to 1.5gb of ram, depending on what you have loading on boot.

without spending a ton of money on the system and ensure it will to run ah fairly well...you're going to want to put 8gb of ram in it, either a radeon 7850 2gb or a gtx660ti 2gb video card, and a min 550 watt power supply.

*note* only look at seasonic, thermaltake, corsair (builder, enthusiast, professional series), and some select xfx power supplies...

[Bizman]

Sorry for wandering slightly off-topic, but so far I've never seen a PSU without a label, and I've opened numerous OEM's manufactured during the past quarter of a century. Every single one has had a label telling the maximum combined wattage as well as that for each voltage.

+1 on what Gyrene said about RAM. RAM is dirt cheap these days.

[danmac]

No extra connectors that I saw I just going to buy a new PSU I saw a corsair that was 800 or 850 and the price wasent that bad http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemNumber=N82E16817139011
And the ram I was looking at is
http://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemNumber=N82E16820148540 and get 2 of them for 16 gig of ram on my mother board I gave 4 slots 2 blue and 2 black what's the difference their

[gyrene81]

the different colored slots designate which are paired for dual channel ram operation...one set would be slot 0 and 1 and the other set would be 2 and 4. as a general rule (there are exceptions) if you run just 2 ram chips, they must be in like colored slots to work properly.

you would only need to go 8gb to get more than adequate performance...and 1333mhz would be max without overclocking. and overclocking (especially with that hardware platform) opens another can of worms you may not want to get into.

your newegg links didn't work...missing some data on the hyperlink.

[guncrasher]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139011

and ram

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20-148-540&Tpk=n82e16820148540

the ram is a one stick 8 gb that may not work.  you may want to get 2x2gb or completely replace what you have with 2x4gb which is what I would do, just to have same brand and avoid problems.


semp

[Bizman]

The 650 Watt version would be more than sufficient for your current and future needs. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139012 will save you the cost of the RAM you're going to buy. Your motherboard only can take one GPU, so multi-GPU support is unnecessary. You might also want to know, that too powerful a PSU can cause problems. They work best when they're optimally loaded. Although not the technically valid explanation, you might remember this from your physics lessons from school: Energy doesn't disappear, it just transforms. You wouldn't want your PSU be a heater for those cold winter nights.

[danmac]

Ok so over doing it is bad the 650w is a lot cheaper so that's a plus looks like that's the anger for that

And the gtx660ti is my video card answer is their a ram brand thats good and ones to stay away from and I guess I'll get 2 4gig to take care of the problem and thanks for all the help guys its made this way easier than I though it was

[gyrene81]

Ok so over doing it is bad the 650w is a lot cheaper so that's a plus looks like that's the anger for that

And the gtx660ti is my video card answer is their a ram brand thats good and ones to stay away from and I guess I'll get 2 4gig to take care of the problem and thanks for all the help guys its made this way easier than I though it was

the list would be shorter to just tell you what memory brands to look at...and if you can get it, grab low profile. makes fitting an after market cpu cooler easier.

corsair (vengence), crucial (ballistix), patriot (viper), gskill (ripjaw or sniper)...

[danmac]

This?http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233186

[danmac]

And the link may not work I'm doing all this from my phone

[guncrasher]

get the ram that is 1300.  at 1600 you would have to overclock and you will have to go into bios for that. 

something like this.  and I would probably look up the mobo's website and look for comparable ram.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145251

semp

[gyrene81]

what Semp said  ...but not the corsair xms memory. unless i just happened into a faulty prod run at the time (2 years ago), the last batch i bought had to replace nearly all of them.