choosing the right graphics card for my pc

[frankievali]

hello all, I have a hp m7330n media center pc that I purchased a couple of weeks ago and I want to upgrade the onboard video to a pci express card. I was looking at ati's website and I put in my pc info and I received suggestions for which of their cards to use. I have chosen to buy the X1300 pro made by ATI, but on the box it says that a 350 watt power supply or higher is recommended (assumes fully loaded system). so now this is contrary to what ATI's website gave me. Would this be a problem considering the power supply in my HP is 300 watts? Would I have a problem if I use this card and what do they mean by a fully loaded system? thank you in advance.

[hockey man]

First off, what do you want the card for? Are you a gamer? Or are you just looking for a little more performance? Also, what is your budget for this upgrade? And Welcom to the PcGuide!

[saphalline]

Please don't make us dig through pages and pages of Google searches. Let us know your PC's specs. CPU type & speed, RAM type & amount, all drives and expansion cards in your system, and the details of your voltage rails from the sticker on your PSU.

[frankievali]

ok, here it goes, I hope this makes any sense to you. this is straight from the sticker on the PS:
100-127V-7A
200-240V-4A 50/66hz

+12V-/19A, -12V-/0.8A
+5V-/30A, +5VSB-/2A
+3.3V-/28A
+5V & +3.3V-180W MAX
+5V & +12V 280W MAX

computer specs:
AMD X2 4200+
I gig of ram
dvd burner, dvd rom
250gig hard drive
onboard audio and video
media center os 2005 w/ tv tuner

lI am not much of a gamer, an occasional one, maybe. I want mostly for video editing, connection to tv for media center purposes, those kind of things. I hope that you understand what I wrote from the power supply.

[saphalline]

Holy $#^&!!! Only 19A on the +12V rail and HP put an X2 in there?? :eek:

Well... yes, I think a vid card with TV-out would work, but only if you keep it in the Radeon X1300 or X550 or X300 range. Or you could go NVidia also with a GeForce 6200 or 6600 (non-GT). But seeing as how you've already got your vid card picked out, go with that one. That's as high as I would go with that PSU, though.

By the way, what's the price of that X1300 Pro you found?

[frankievali]

it is on sale at best buy for $149.99 plus tax. I actually had a problem with another video card I bought on Newegg, which was a asus nvidia 6600, so I need to try another one to see if it was the video card that I bought. just in case you might know the problem, all of a sudden I could not get a signal from the monitor past the windows loading screen. after that screen everything went to black and the monitor said there was no signal. now I want to try another card to see if that works. I only bought this a couple of weeks ago like I said, so I can still go back to the store if there is a greater problem like with the pc itself. do you have any idea why this might of happened? now the funny thing is that both dvi and vga connections failed, but the s-video out to the tv was ok. I tried re-installing the drivers, checking to make sure the card was positioned correctly on the slot, tried the monitor on my old computer, but nothing seemed to fix it. any ideas before I try the new card?

[saphalline]

If the S-Video output worked, but not any of the others, it's possible you switched the main desktop output to S-Video. That would make Windows send the image to S-Video first and leave the others blank. That's the first thing I would check.

[frankievali]

how would I go about doing that? Also, I had it on standby when this happened. I left it on overnight, before I went to sleep everything was fine, then I try to go on and nothing. when I rebooted I could only see on the
s-video. what do you think?

[saphalline]

Right-click on the desktop, go down to Properties. The Display Properties box will pop up. Click on the Settings tab, then the Advanced button near the bottom. The vid card's control panel box will pop up. Click on the tab that says "Displays" or something similar (you're looking for the tab that shows all your monitor options and outputs). In that tab, you'll find all the options for controlling which output is your main output for Windows. Change it to your monitor, either VGA or DVI.

This may not be the problem, but it's a relatively easy procedure and most of all it's free! :D

[frankievali]

thanks buddy, I appreciate the help. I will try it tonight and see what happens. Hope to get this cleared up.