Can I upgrade this?

[NL mkII]

Okay, sadly I don't have the pc with me, it is on a friends pc 3000 miles away so I can't just open it up and take a look. She lives with someone who has no idea about pc's but could easily do any install for her (I mean seriously, its not hard). She has had a problem with her screen going black for a couple of seconds here and there, I assume it is a graphics card issue and so looking to see what she can upgrade to.

The problem I am having is knowing exactly what her pc can take. The relevant things here are below

Acer Aspire x3200
acer wmcp78m motherboard (with Nvidia 9200 onboard graphics)

I'm not 100% sure but I believe from looking through some other forums that this motherboard has a PCI-E x16 slot. If that is the case would there be any other issues with installing a graphics card past just putting it in? Will there be any incompatibility issues at all?

Thanks in advance and if more info is needed feel free to ask. Everything I know has been gathered from using remote assistance on her pc, which I can happily do again whenever it is needed.

 

[Schmide]

So she's not a gamer? Could it be monitor going to sleep? I would certainly eliminate that and get the latest drivers on her system before you go out and get a relatively pricey low profile card that would seem to push her TV tuner out of the system.

Google says you have a low profile pci-e slot with a 220w psu.

If you were attempting to get anything that would game you would certainly be pushing the PSU near the edge.

 

[happy medium]

I believe it has a half height slot......

Removing two Philips screws lets you lift the lid and inspect the abovementioned motherboard, which in addition to the PCIe x1 slot has one PCI Express x16 slot for a half-height discrete graphics card. Acer says the X3200's nForce 720a chipset supports Nvidia SLI sharing of graphics duties between a discrete card and the integrated GeForce 8200 graphics processing unit. Our test unit had only the latter, which features 16 shaders or processors and its own 256MB of display memory.

9600gt half height

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814500103

edit 220watt psu ....nevermind

 

[NL mkII]

She is a gamer. Mainly playing mmorpg's. She recently tried Aion for example. Graphics are important to her but she isn't rich, she has been fine with the graphics as they are in her current system so she wouldnt need anything better than the nvidia9200 on board she already has.

So basically to upgrade she is going to need to find a low wattage graphics card to not push the PSU? In a way she'll be thankful that she wont be able to spend much! I'll run a wattage checker on all the stuff she has to see what will fit. Any ideas?

Oh, what does the low profile part of pci-e mean? Physical size of the card I assume.

 

[Schmide]

It seems to come with a few different processors.

The specs I'm looking at have a

40w AMD Athlon X2 4850e 2.5GHz which is about a processor.
60w The Low Profile 9600 uses around I've heard the Galaxy is a dustbuster.
30-40w for your chipset
25w for you drives, ram, misc

165w on your 12v.
So you could get away with it. You would certainly be running load in the 80% usage of the PSU.

 

[NL mkII]

Its a Phenom x3 8450 processor. Using the Antec psu calculator I got a reading of 192W or 183W depending on whether it has 2 or 4 sticks of ram (4gig's overall). Though I guess it is posible that with the higher processor they bundle it with a larger psu, if they don't I dont see how she could fit any new graphics card in at all. I assume its possible to turn off the on board graphics card in the bios so it doesnt draw power there, but its just pushing too close to the wattage limit if its a 220W. In fact I'm wondering if that might be the issue rather than the graphics card anyway. It started happening when she was playing a game called Perfect World, which loaded her system quite heavily.


Its really annoying not having this pc directly in front of me so I can just look at it >.< Trying to get someone who doesnt even know what a graphics card is to give you details about the system is beyond difficult!

 

[happy medium]

Look around for one of these... gt240 low profile. Very low wattage!

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=26581

 

[Schmide]

Yeah the Phenom x3 8450 is like 80-90w. The GT240 is about 40w so you're saving about 20-30w on the graphics card.

Since the above processor is like 40w more than the one I used in my calculations. You're coming out 10-20w more. Still doable but much closer to the edge.

 

[NL mkII]

Thanks guys I'll take a look. I'll also try and find out if they upgraded the PSU for this system. Damn I hope so

 

[NL mkII]

Sadly I found this on the acer website
http://support.acer.com/acerpanam/desktop/0000/Acer/AspireX3200/AspireX3200sp2.shtml

so it looks like it will always be a 220W psu.

Is it possible her monitor is black screening due to low power anyway? Or is it almost definately a problem with the graphics card?

 

[Schmide]

It could be overheating. You should have her clean out the dust if there is any.

 

[NL mkII]

Yeah I got her to do that, though I'm not sure if she is comfortable opening up the pc to properly dust off the internal parts.

 

[djnsmith7]

Since you mentioned you've been using remote assistance to troubleshoot the issues referenced, I thought I'd mention using Sandra SiSoft to eliminate some of the guesswork with the troubleshooting & actually look at each component. Not sure if you've done that already or not.

http://www.sisoftware.net/index.html?dir=dload&location=sware_dl_3264&langx=en&a=

 

[NL mkII]

Thanks, I'll take a look at that next time she gets online.

 

[NL mkII]

Is there a program like that that will work out the wattage being used by a pc, so far I've always just used the calculator on Antec.com as I've always just went for a psu that is about 30% higher than needed, this time though I need to be more accurate.

Also as I'm not really all that knowledgable about the area of pc building that involves pushign a psu to its limit, is it going to cause any big issues if she has 240W on a 220W psu?

I'm starting to think that the problem here might be that the psu was never big enough to start with. Tempted to get her to buy a new PSU first and see if that fixes it, the guy she lives with doesnt know much about pc's, but he installs alarm systems for a living, so I can't see him finding it tough to drop a new psu in to a pc. If thats the case she could also get away with a cheap crappy $20 psu (her pc isn't really that good anyway, so getting a good pricey one probably isn't worth the money)

Edit:
Thanks for the Sisoftware mention, I haven't actually used that program before, its truly awesome. After being able to correctly look at all the components accurately I looked over the required wattage again and 220W is so far from what is needed its ridiculous. I'm going to get her flatmate to open up the pc later and check out the actual PSU inside, I honestly can't believe they built this with a 220W PSU despite what the website says. With 30% capacitor aging (a pretty moderate estimate considering it has seen heavy usage for the last year and was purchased refurbished) it would require just over 300W at 90% load, even with no aging 220W isn't quite enough.

Thanks for the ongoing help people, you guys are the bomb ^^

Considering what to advise for a cheap 400ish watt PSU atm. She really doesnt have much money at all, though I think she should be able to stump up the $45 for this Corsair CX400W which would be perfect for her system and allow her space to upgrade the GPU in the future. Any further advice on this would be appreciated, I bought this psu myself a few months ago and believed it to be the best overall combination, but i haven't looked up on them in a while.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4236686&CatId=1078
Also if anyone knows of a particularly good option at a significantly cheaper price that would be cool, though I can't imagine someone not being able to pay 45 bucks!.