Inspiron 531 video card upgrade

You'll need a new power supply to run the 5570 in a Insprion 531.  It requires at least a 400w PSU.  Other than that it will fit and it's backwards compatible to the PCI-E in the 531.

Hi, I was wanting to upgrade the graphics card on my Inspiron 531 mini tower. Does anyone know if there are any known problems (or if it is OK...) to upgrade to the Radeon 5500 Series ? Specifically I was thinking of a 5570. Not sure if I'm being paranoid or not ;),  but some questions I have are: is the PCI-Express (1.0a) version too old ? and is the Power Supply too light-weight ? Current system is a AMD X2 5600+, Nvidia 8300 GS, 300 Watt Power supply. Thanks, V

vogonm

Most generic standard ATX power supply units can be installed, with either a 24-pin or 20+4-pin main motherboard power connector, with or without the on/off switch.

You should be able to buy a compatible power supply from either a local or online computer store.

Note: You require a power supply with four SATA power connectors.

Bev.

Just wanted to update this thread in case anyone else was thinking of doing the same thing.

Thanks for the above suggestions. I ignored them anyway ;)...  Officially, yes, the shipped power supply is under-powered for a Radeon 5570 (which I installed last week) - It says it recommends a 400W power supply. I did however install one of the lower-clocked 5570s - (officially I think it was a "XFX ATI Radeon 5570 HD 1GB DDR2 PCI-Express HDMI - HD-557X-ZHF2"). After a few hours gaming, it all looks stable.

Anyway, it is (mostly) compatible. Frame rate doubled for a Quake 4 demo I tested with. Some issues have cropped up though. Post times before booting up the bios have gone up from ~10 seconds to ~40 seconds. Also the computer will now no longer wake up from sleeping - I basically have to reboot if it sleeps - it then does remember the state it was in, but the whole reboot and waking up takes about 3 minutes till the machine is working normally again. I may end up turning off sleeping which is a bit annoying... From looking around the internet, this problem has been seen with upgrades to the Radeon 5xxx series (I think).

If anyone knows how to get round the sleep problem, please post here :). Also, I found this web-site useful for calculating power requirements for upgrades, etc:

http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Cheers all.

If anyone knows how to get round the sleep problem, please post here :). Also, I found this web-site useful for calculating power requirements for upgrades, etc:

Hi, I was wanting to upgrade the graphics card on my Inspiron 531 mini tower. Does anyone know if there are any known problems (or if it is OK...) to upgrade to the Radeon 5500 Series ? Specifically I was thinking of a 5570. Not sure if I'm being paranoid or not ;),  but some questions I have are: is the PCI-Express (1.0a) version too old ? and is the Power Supply too light-weight ? Current system is a AMD X2 5600+, Nvidia 8300 GS, 300 Watt Power supply.