HTPC card compatible with a 240W PSU

[Ricedaddy]

I was given a workstation pc that is equipped with a 240w power supply and after some troubleshooting, I determined that the onboard video appears to be nonfunctional. I'm wanting to pick up a video card to attempt to make this a HTPC.

I looked at Radeon 5450 cards, but they require at least a 300w psu. The extreme outervision psu calculator recommends only a minimum psu wattage of 140w. This system is extremely lean with 4gb ram, core2duo, one hard drive and one optical drive.

Any suggestions on a video card that could be powered by this? HDMI is a requirement, no gaming will happen with this system.

Thanks.

 

[scaarbelly]

a 5450 would work. Check out Newegg's black friday sale, there are a few cards for under $20 that have hdmi and would work fine, even though they say they need a little bigger psu.

 

[Yoda4561]

PSU recommendations from the gpu makers are blanket statements with a large safety margin. What you need to do is tally up the combined 12 volt wattages of all your components and see how much that leaves you for the video card, and stay well under what's left over. A 6570 draws about 40-60 watts at full load depending on the ram configuration, a 6450 or 5450 about 20-30 watts. Under HTPC conditions both will draw less than that.