My boy has said he'd like a PC for his birthday in March and would like to play minecraft. I have a Zotac 890itx wifi motherboard with an AMD Phenom II 955BE x4 CPU, 8gb RAM, 240w shuttle PSU but I'm stuck on what graphic card to get, a wiki article says the best spec would be either a gt240 or HD5550 or higher. Is there anything you lot would recommend? I'm a bit lost with graphics cards.
I don't want to go silly, there is stuff on scan and ebuyer of that spec or what I think is better for sub £50 which are roughly ddr3, 1gb.
If you're going for new, something like a 6670 will be plenty. clicky However, posting a wanted thread on the marketplace will net you a card that will piddle all over that card for much less.
According to Tom's Hardware's Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart, the 6450 is thereabouts on par with a GT220. One step below the 5550. It may play Minecraft - my son has played it on a single Dell laptop with Intel Graphics at 1024x768. For a little more money you can have some peace of mind. What res is the monitor?
Not a clue, I'm get to get it from my brother, I'd imagine 1600x1200 ish. I'm limited on space, so I don't know if something with a full cooler would fit, where as the one I linked is thinner both in height and has a smaller cooler.
Minecraft can be a bit strange sometimes. If you want a decent render distance, something like a 4650 equivalent will do you fine. You may want to change your psu though. A quad core and gpu on a 240W psu?
What case do you have? Why not get an sfx psu like the Bequiet 300W (or is it 350W?). Edit: This one. A bit pricy, but its got great reviews.
Cookie, if you need a case, I have a black bog standard (but barely used) Novatech case you can have for postage.
I was going to try and mod it all into a radio controlled car shell. This PSU (which measures 45mm high, 65mm wide and 190 long) will just fit if I stack the motherboard on top of it. There are no pico PSU's that I know of over 140/160w ish or that would have been ideal.
Pity that case isn't 17mm higher or you could have fit that sfx psu in there. Its worrying though. I checked on psu calculator and with an HD 4650 and one sata hdd (no fans or anything else), you'd be pulling 190W.
Yeah I just checked myself mate, you can tell I've not build a PC in a few years as I totally forgot about this kind of thing. Looks like I'm going to have to get the cardboard out and make scale models of components and see what I can do. Cheers.
No probs. If its only for minecraft, you could always sell the Phenom x4 and buy a dual core, then use the extra cash for a better psu?
I don't want to sound like a tw@t as I'm not rich my any means but the cash isn't really a problem, I don't see £45 on a PSU as expensive. I'd just like it to work and be a decent PC for the job and all to fit inside an RC car shell which I'm going to .
Are you calling me poor? Lmao. If it MUST fit into the RC Car shell, then you'll have to make the hardware work without blowing the psu. Depending on the efficiency of the PSU, you might be ok, but it will be running at close to its max wattage... Maybe go dual core to save some power. How are the onboard graphics?
Yeah it MUST fit in the car shell. From the Zotac website the graphics are below, which should run it, but I'd just like a bit more BEEF!
Yeah it will run it, but not at great settings. How much USABLE space have you got in the RC shell? Enough for a full height GPU?
lol, NOPE. The plan was to re-make the chassis and mount the PSU on that offset to one side, then mount the motherboard on a raised tray above the PSU, the GFX will me mounted to the underside of the tray via a PCI-E ribbon cable. THis is why I've been looking at the cards what are not full width, the ones which have the D-SUB monitor connection on a ribbon cable plugged into the board, that way I can unplug it, remove the bracket and save some space. The shell is slightly wider than the 170mm wide mini-ITX board, but I also wanted to keep the shocks and steering functional.
