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r7 240 to 360
Hello
I currently use an radeon r7 240 in my optiplex 960 tower. I am wondering if i upgrade the 430 watt ps to 550 watt , will the r7 360 work on the motherboard in the 960 tower ? I think i read somewhere that the motherboard only supports 35w on pci-e.
Can anyone enlighten me on this ? I have read the manual and still did not see anything on this , maybe i missed it.
Thanks in advance.
beamermt79
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May 24th, 2017 12:00
If you change the PSU the only problem is the PCIe bottleneck. I believe your computer has PCIe 1.x, and the card you have and in question are PCIe 3.0 so you won't get the full bandwidth from the card.
jfmy787
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May 24th, 2017 13:00
I also tried calling dell customer support and after 45 minutes speaking with a rep he finally figured out it was no longer covered by dell. I asked more than once if he could tell me what the max power consumption a video card could have in an optiplex 960 tower. He kept talking about out of warranty charges . So that was a huge waste of my time. hopefully someone here will have some info on this.
I may just bite the bullet and go back to building my own machines. I bought this 960 tower thinking to save some money. I never thought getting info on it would be so hard.
jfmy787
95 Posts
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May 24th, 2017 13:00
Well i was worried about the power supplied on the pci-e bus. Dont want to overload the motherboard.
r7 360 avg power 100w
r7 240 avg power 30w
I hve not been able to find anything on this anywhere for the optiplex 960 at all
beamermt79
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May 25th, 2017 13:00
A PCIe x16 Slot provides a maximum of 75 watts of power to the card installed. If the card requires more power, it will have a 4, 6, or 8 pin plug that you would use to plug in an cable from the PSU to the card. The r7 360 requires a minimum of 450 to 500 watts depending on which brand and how they made the card, which would require the external power connector.
That being said, your computer is so old that it has at best, PCIe x16 Version 1, maybe Version 2. Regardless these cards you are looking at or have installed are Version 3 which means you will not get full bus bandwidth from any card you install.
jfmy787
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May 25th, 2017 18:00
Several of my buddies have almost the same machine i have , theirs are just a little slower cpu. The performance of the 360 over the 240 for watching 4k videos is what i want it for. A lot of my buddies use the 360/340 for 4k video watching and say it is way better than the 240. I have a new never used 550w power supply , so i will get a r7 360 and see for myself if it is a difference that i can see. Other than that the 240 works just fine.