I bought my sister a refurbished Dell XPS X8300 (specs below) off of ebay as an early Christmas gift. When I got it in, I discovered that the Radeon HD 6770 that came in the machine from Dell had been removed (it wasn't mentioned in the ebay ad; I found out about it by looking up the service tag).
I had a spare Gigabyte Radeon HD 6670 1gb, so I dropped it in, but got no video on either one or two monitors. I thought maybe the Dell 460w PSU couldn't handle the card (even though it fell well within the card's requirements), so I put an older Rosewill Green Series 630w PSU in it, but still had the same results. I went back to the stock PSU.
I dropped a spare really old Geforce 9400GT in it, and it worked well with both monitors. I then tried my Radeon HD 6950 2gb, but still got no video. I tried the 6670 again with the same results, so I put the 9400GT back in and gave it to my sister (who had been without a PC for 2 wks).
The trouble is, that 9400GT is going to really hold the system back in gaming. The WIndows Experience rating, even with the latest drivers, etc, is a paltry 4.9 due to the graphics.
What could be the problem with this? Could the motherboard have a semi-bad PCI-E slot that won't take a Radeon card, or perhaps one that requires more than a bare minimum of power? I would like to get the problem taken care of, because an i5 with a decent video card and 6gb of ram would last her for 3-4 years easily.
Thanks.
Dell XPS X8300 specs as received
CPU: i5-2310, 2.9ghz
Video: Intel 2nd Generation Core Family Integrated Graphics Controller
RAM: 6gb 1333mhz dual channel (2x 2gb, 2x 1gb)
HD: 1tb Western Digital Caviar Blue
Optical: DVD-RW
PSU: Dell 460w
OS: Win 7 64 Home Premium (clean install)
Items added by me
Video: old Geforce 9400GT 512mb
HD: 640gb Western Digital Caviar Blue
I had a spare Gigabyte Radeon HD 6670 1gb, so I dropped it in, but got no video on either one or two monitors. I thought maybe the Dell 460w PSU couldn't handle the card (even though it fell well within the card's requirements), so I put an older Rosewill Green Series 630w PSU in it, but still had the same results. I went back to the stock PSU.
I dropped a spare really old Geforce 9400GT in it, and it worked well with both monitors. I then tried my Radeon HD 6950 2gb, but still got no video. I tried the 6670 again with the same results, so I put the 9400GT back in and gave it to my sister (who had been without a PC for 2 wks).
The trouble is, that 9400GT is going to really hold the system back in gaming. The WIndows Experience rating, even with the latest drivers, etc, is a paltry 4.9 due to the graphics.
What could be the problem with this? Could the motherboard have a semi-bad PCI-E slot that won't take a Radeon card, or perhaps one that requires more than a bare minimum of power? I would like to get the problem taken care of, because an i5 with a decent video card and 6gb of ram would last her for 3-4 years easily.
Thanks.
Dell XPS X8300 specs as received
CPU: i5-2310, 2.9ghz
Video: Intel 2nd Generation Core Family Integrated Graphics Controller
RAM: 6gb 1333mhz dual channel (2x 2gb, 2x 1gb)
HD: 1tb Western Digital Caviar Blue
Optical: DVD-RW
PSU: Dell 460w
OS: Win 7 64 Home Premium (clean install)
Items added by me
Video: old Geforce 9400GT 512mb
HD: 640gb Western Digital Caviar Blue
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