Dell Vostro 430 Graphics Card Upgrade

Hi, Looking at your specks HERE<ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed / replaced from this post by Dell>

, you will get an full hight card into that system, and your PSU is an 350w. So, you could get the 4670 HERE, though it says 400w, or the Nvidia 240 HERE. You will have to upgrade your PSU to get the 4890, or the 5770 in. But, any standard ATX type PSU will fit into that case.

I would give the HD 5770 a try.  It will probably work fine on the 350 watt power supply.  The 4890 would be a bit too much though.  Here is a chart to look at.  It would seem that the 5770 doesn't use any more power than a 9600 GT I used to run on the 350W PSU and I never had any problems.  I pictured your MOBO below.  It does not seem like there would be a fit problem as long as you did not have a PCIe x1 card which most do not.  My I530 has a very similar board and I have the GTS 250 in it which is larger than the HD 5770.

Thanks Chaps ! I got the 430MT (on a very good deal!) instead of a much more expensive gaming system and thought I'd shot myself in the foot !

I think I'll try the 5770 but for the money involved will probably upgrade the PSU in case. I read several threads which said you can't fit a bigger card than a GTS240 or something like that in (9800GT?) and I need the speed for Empire/Napoleon etc. Would a 5770 block other ports though ?

Well, best get ordering.

What are the possibilities should the PSU not be powerful enough with the addition of a new graphics card such as the 5770?

Hi Yeowj,

I think the previous posters have exlained it pretty well, it should work with the existing PSU, but if you need to (ie you may have other power hungry extras in your system) then it is fairly easy to swap it for a more powerful PSU.

If I ever receive my 430 (delayed another week...thanks Dell!) then I'll let you know. Having researched this a bit I will check the internal fit for a bigger graphics card when I get my machine and if I can, squeeze in a 5770 and possibly a 500w PSU aswell.

Siko

Hi Psychovadge. I just re-read over my initial question and it was very badly phrased. What I meant to say was if my power supply was not powerful enough to run the hardware in my computer what would happen?

Would the hardware simply not start?
Assuming that the hardware starts, would there be a risk of it crashing and/or damaging other components such as GPU or motherboard?
Would the PSU blow up? 

If I was to buy the 5770, would a PCI express sound card fit underneath this graphics card? The space from the pictures of the motherboard above, lead me to believe the gap is very small. 

As part of my upgrades, I'm thinking 450W power supply (easy enough). I'm guessing the supply from my full tower should fit in this mini tower.
Graphics card - ATi 5770 or equivilent Nvidia
PCI-express X-Fi Sound card, or old Soundblaster 5.1 card
Wireless PCI adapter for networking
1tb hard drive (If I swap out the Dell 160gb hard drive, can I install and use the licensed version of Windows on this drive?

Thanks for the help. 

I just re-read over my initial question and it was very badly phrased. What I meant to say was if my power supply was not powerful enough to run the hardware in my computer what would happen?

If I was to buy the 5770, would a PCI express sound card fit underneath this graphics card? The space from the pictures of the motherboard above, lead me to believe the gap is very small.

 The PCI card should fit, almost all the Radeon 5770 cards are dual slot, meaning they take up two of the available slots on the motherboard.  As long as the motherboard in the Vostro 430 has a full space between the PCI-Ex16 slot and the next PCI slot, you should be okay.  My Vostro 220 does not have the space, so I lost the use of one of my PCI slots when I installed my graphics card.  Not a problem since I use the onboard sound and a USB Wireless network adapter.

1tb hard drive (If I swap out the Dell 160gb hard drive, can I install and use the licensed version of Windows on this drive?

You would probably need to clone your existing drive to the new drive in order to use the licensed version of Windows on the new drive.  Check with Dell support to make sure.  When I upgraded my drive from the factory 250 gb Seagate to a new Western Digital 500 gb drive, I downloaded Acronius from the Western Digital website.  It even cloned the hidden partition which contains the factory restore data.  The only downside is that it created new partitions in the same percentage as the cloned drive, so my factory restore partition is 20 gb in size even though the data contained in it is only 6 gb.  So it essentially wastes 14 gb of storage.  Also, if I am not mistaken, replacing the factory hard drive will probably void your warranty.  (Unless you keep the original drive and replace it prior to sending it back for repairs, I suspect)  Adding the 5770 video card may do the same thing.

The only other concern I would express to you is to make sure that the Dell 350 Watt power supply has the 6 pin PCI-E power connector available.  I note that the graphics card options are only the Nvidia 310, the Nvidia 220GT and the NVidia 240 GTS, none of which require the exra power connector.  That would be my only concern with the stock 350W power supply.  If you plan to upgrade the power supply, the question is moot.  If the standard PSU doesn't offer the 6 pin power connector, maybe you should consider the RAdeon HD5670 instead.  Less performance, but much less power required (does not have the 6 pin power connector).  And still decent performance, significantly beating the GT240.

Thanks 2ndtimer. Your post was extremely helpful and cleared up a few questions that were bugging me.

I've decided to transfer an old 250gb hard drive into the Dell. The Radeon 5770 takes up two slots, so I'll lose the PCI-express slot. I'll just transfer the PCI sound card from my old computer to the Dell.

In time, stuff like hard drives will only get cheaper, so I'll either wait for them to drop in price, or perhaps get an SSD when they are more affordable. 

For anyone interested, I got my Sapphire Vapour-x 5770 and OCZ 500w PSU today. Despite having the technical ability of a small fish, i managed to install both in about 20 mins.

It was really easy and I am convinced you could fit a much bigger card in there, also there is a gap between the pci-e and the next pci so I haven't lost any space - I think !

It runs like a dream now - in windows experience I get 7.5 odd on everything bar the HDD.

Do it!

Ha....small world eh ?!!

Yeah i really like the Dell too, I was slightly worried after I ordered it because a lot of doomongers on a website I frequent said you'd wouldn't be able to add anything over a low powered single slot card into it and it would never make a gaming pc. It was actually ok with the 4350 and I ran empire, Il2, COH etc with all the bells and whistles at 1280x1024.

I am happy to have proved them wrong, it will never be an extreme gaming pc with crossfire etc but it is pretty good for the 99% of us who don't want to play crysis at full resolution. I plan to upgrade the graphics card in a year or so when the 5870 comes down in price (now that could be an interesting one to fit!), I have also added a Benq G2222HDL and for less than £800 I have got an awesome games machine that beats anything else I could find for the cash.

One word of caution though, everyone, and I mean everyone I spoke (I have some proper geeks at work!)  to about the PSU reccommended that I add an upgraded one. I looked at the various tests on the net with the 5770 and it seemed like the average system with the 5770 isn't drawing more than 300w power, but I decided to change the stock 350w one anyhow.

When I booted up the 5770...with the stock PSU....it got really noisy and appeared to be under quite a bit of strain.....I then stuck the 500w PSU in straight away and it is very quiet and appears strain free. I think you may get away with not changing the PSU, but I think with your setup you are running it very close to the limits. It probably won't break now, but in 6 months time ? For the price of a respectable PSU - £40-50- I'd do it mate.

Yep! 5770 was really the only viable DX11 to use with the vostro and 350W. Even the hard drive I bought was a WD low power consumption drive. It makes a good gaming pc, because it looks like a work pc (which is what I'm supposed to be using it for!) but holds it's own for the odd game.

When I received my Vostro from Dell, it was always noisy turning on, then quietens down. When I carried out the upgrades, the noise was the same. The case remains very cool and there is no change in noise levels. If anything, the desktop is quieter after installing the latest BIOS 2.0.2. The only time it got mildly warm, was running the Prime95 stress test for 3 hours.

Since I haven't noticed any difference from Ati 4350 to 5770 till I upgrade the card to something more powerful in the future. However just out of interest, what power supply did you buy? Is there anything in particular to look out for when purchasing a power supply in terms of quality/reliability/audibility? It's strange to say about a power supply, but i like the simplicity of the Dell one. It doesn't have all these lights and golden grille plates that others I've seen have. Something that annoys me about the Sapphire 5770 is the blue light that shines out the case at night.

I found a card reader and these are some pictures I took. It's hard to find actual pictures of the Vostro 430, so I took some images that hopefully allow people to get a feel for the size of it.

Hey guys, I'm in the same situation as you once were. I bought the Dell Vostro 430 and here is its specs:

Intel Core i7 860 (2.80ghz, 8mb)

3gb ram(1333 mhz)

and the stock graphics card:

ATI Radeon HD 4350 (512 mb)

which I replaced with my older card (Nvidia Geforce 9500 GT (512mb, DDR2)

1) Now the problem is, I wanna replace that graphics card with the ATI Radeon HD 5770.

And, as you may know already, the PSU is only 350 watts. The question is: Will it work with the 350 watt PSU?

Will it fit into the desktop?  I know it's kind of a repetetive question but I really wanna make sure that everything will work right.

2) And about the PSU. If I were to replace it, what type of PSU should I look for? How will I know if it's compatible with my computer?

I read somewhere that any standard ATX-type PSU will work. Is that all I need to know? What's this ATX 12V?  Also, please add any other information that may prove useful.

Thanks for the reply, Pyschovadge!

My computer has very little components - no sound card, just your ordinary PC.

Will any ATX-Type Power supply fit into the case/be compatible with the system(Also, do you have any idea what this ATX 12V is)?

I opened my desktop last night and looked at the cables. I now know  what cables to look for in a Power supply. Sata cable for Hard Drive, Sata cable for DVD/CD drive, 24 pin main power cable, 4 pin cable, and 6 pin PCI Express cable for ATI Radeon HD 5770 (correct me if I get some wrong).

Just out of curiousty, what would be the "best" graphics card that will work with 350 watt PSU? I'm hearing a lot about this ATI Radeon HD 4670. Still, I want to hear your opinion.

Thanks again!

i think it's also important to have a look at the connectors supplied with the PSU. I haven't upgraded from my 350W Bestec supply. But I was looking at some cheap £20 600W supplies and whilst getting goods reviews, it seems they only have enough connectors for perhaps one hard drive and optical drive.

I think it's possible you can buy further cables yourself and "daisy-chain" them to the PSU, but the beauty of the Dell supply is that there are exactly two sata connectors for optical drives, and two for hard drives. Plus the Video-card power cable is already connected. No need to install the ones that come bundled with the card. I actually had no idea how to connect the video card cable to the power supply unit, so was glad that Dell has sorted that all out already.

This is something that I think isn't mentioned when talking about power supplies. People focus on the quality and performance, but not on the connectors. I don't know how difficult it is to add connectors, but more bundled connectors probably mean less hassle and stress in the long term.