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Upgrade Video card on Studio XPS
Hi, all.
I recently purchased a Dell Studio XPS with an ATI Radeon HD 4350 512MB video card. I am looking to upgrade the video card so that it will run games like Crysis or Oblivion at a fairly good resolution (my flatscreen monitor goes up to about 1600x1200). I have been looking at the ASUS GTX260 TOP 1GB card. Is this a good choice for a mid-range card? Are there any problems with upgrading to this card?
Is there room in the case? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
Chris
JMICHAEL
1.7K Posts
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August 14th, 2009 13:00
The GTX 260 is a good card. It is hard to think of this card as a mid-range card but it probably is today with all the others out there. Make sure it is a 216 core card. Personally, I would choose the EVGA brand over Asus, but this is your choice. The card will most likely fit but it is huge compared the a HD 4350. You will have to upgrade your power supply if you are going to consider this card. Two 6-pin PCIe power cables are required for it to work and I'm not sure if you have any at all with your current PSU. If you look at the GTX 260's on Newegg HERE by the number of reviews, you will see that the EVGA cards are purchased the most by a considerable amount.
Cgeist7
2 Posts
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August 16th, 2009 08:00
Hi, there.
I brought my system into a local PC shop to do the PSU upgrade to 500w and install an ASUS GTX 260 TOP.
The service staff first stated that the card wouldn't fit, but thought they could get an ASUS GTS 250 into the Studio XPS 435 MTS case. They managed to get the card in and install the drivers, but it kept blue-screening and after a few hours of trying to fix it, I went back to the base card.
Has anyone else had issues like this? I purchased the Studio XPS as a good entry point into the i7-920 CPU and was planning on upgrading the graphics card to something better than the Dell upgrade options from the start. What good graphic upgrades have people successfully installed? Should I look at returning the system and moving to a "next step up" system? (I am within my 30 days of receipt)
Would an ATI Radeon HD 4670 fit and work?
Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Chris
JMICHAEL
1.7K Posts
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August 16th, 2009 20:00
Well, here's a picture of the Studio XPS 435MT with an upgraded Antec power supply and a GTX 280 and everything works fine. As long as you have only one hard drive, you should be able to get these larger cards in there and still have several inches of room in the back. I have a EVGA GTS 250 is a similar case and things are fine. The only thing I don't like about the board design is that the PCIe x16 is near the bottom of the case making very little clearance between the card and case bottom. However, no heat issues apparently resulted from this particular setup. You definitely would not want a card with a large fan and heatsink that did not exhaust heat out of the back. I would think any single slot cards would work fine also such as an HD 4670. But as you can see, the dual slot cards work also so I'm not sure what is going on.