Vostro 410 graphics card upgrade

I would take a measurement.  The Vostro is very similar to the case design of the Inspiron and it will fit some long video cards.  The XFX is 10.3" long so stick a tape measure in there to make sure.  If you are going with the HD 6870, you will need to upgrade your power supply, however.  This card requires two 6-pin PCIe power cable connections which you will not have on your current power supply if it still is the stock unit.  Like the Inspiron, if you have two hard drives, it won't fit.  

Yes I'll have to upgrade my power supply as well since this one is only 350W. I guess the OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W will do.

Also i do have 2 hard disks but can't see why this wouldn't work?

Thanks for your help.

It is a dual slot card and will most likely block your top two SATA connectors making only two usable.  Therefore, with 2 hard drives and an optical drive requiring 3 SATA connectors, you are coming up short.  

Hi kelbear1,

What video card would you suggest as an upgrade and that would fit into my current system...

Dell Inc. Vostro 410

Board: Dell Inc. 0J584C A00

BIOS: Dell Inc. 1.0.3

2.67 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad

8192 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

Slot 'DIMM1' has 2048 MB

Slot 'DIMM2' has 2048 MB

Slot 'DIMM3' has 2048 MB

Slot 'DIMM4' has 2048 MB

ST3320620AS [Hard drive]

WDC WD10EARS-00Y5B1 [Hard drive]

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

19-in-1 Media Card Reader

16x DVD+/-RW & 16x DVD Drives

Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)

Many thanks

Ben

What is the purpose for your upgrade?  The 8800 GT was a good card in its day so is this for gaming?  Do you want to upgrade your power supply?  How much do you want to spend?  Based on the cards today and upgrading from the 8800 GT, the minimum I would is the GTS 450.  However, you may not notice a significant difference with this card.  

If I look at your motherboard below, it looks like there is extra space between the PCIe X16 slot and the 1st PCIe X1 slot where a dual slot card may fit without interfering with the SATA connectors.  This is not the case with other boards as the dual slot card runs right over the first 3 SATA connectors making them unusable.  Any card you would upgrade to will be a dual slot versus the single slot of the 8800 GT.  A lot of the newer cards are shorter than the 8800 GT also.  If you look inside your case, you can see how the 8800 GT is situated above these SATA connectors.  Most likely it is right above them and right below your memory connectors with the longer cards.  Often you have to remove the video card just to replace memory modules because the clips won't open with the video card in the way.   

With an Nvidia card, your choice would be the GTX 550 Ti in that price range.  With ATI, the HD 6790.  

or even the Radeon HD 6850?

Hi Kelbear1,

thank you for your advice.  

Would the GeForce GTX 560 Ti   fit and be compatable?

Thanks again

Ben

The GTX 560 Ti is getting up there as far as video cards are concerned.  It should fit and work fine, but it may not necessarily be a good match for an older system and CPU meaning that you may not get the performance out of this card that it is capable of with an older CPU.  

ok, good point. What are your thoughts on the Radeon HD 6850?

Say if you took a list of 200 video cards old and new and ranked them, the 8800 GT would come in at #50, the GTX 550 Ti would be at #29, the HD 6790 at #24 and the HD 6850 at #17.  How this translates to real world performance I'm not sure.  Take a look at the chart below to see how these cards would perform with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 to get an idea with maxed out settings.  You can see that the GTX 560 Ti pulls away from the others with the HD 6850 following and the HD 6790 is really not that far behind.  The game most likely would not be playable at these settings with an 8800 GT.  

Also, would i see much difference in performance with the GTX 550 Ti or the HD 6790?

The HD 6850 is also a very good card and very power efficient compared to the Nvidia cards.  Someone has run this card on their Dell 360 watt unit.  I like the price/performance ratio of this card and consider it a good buy.  It would be considered at the performance level of the Nvidia GTX 460.  I would give it a try since you do have the Core 2 Quad at least.  Just make sure you clean out the Nvidia drivers and software first before changing over to the ATI card and its drivers and software.

Hello guys,
I have a Dell Vostro 410 quad core, but my original graphics card has dead. I have had a minute of silence for it.
What graphics card do you recommend me?
I use Autocad, Photoshop.
The original graphics card was an ATI HD3650 (1Gb ram) and it was working fine. I think a similar graphics card would be ok. For example:
-Ati HD 5450 (2Gb ram)
-Nvidia 610 (2Gb ram)
-Nvidia 730 (2Gb ram)
Please could you help me? Will this graphic cards work properly in my Vostro computer?
Thank you very much.
Daniel