Question Adding a video card need advice

[Still-Tryn]

I know little about building PC’s or hardware compatibility, but thanks to YouTube and reading various internet sites I managed to build a PC many years ago that worked fine until this summer when it started rebooting itself. Based on reading more on various websites I felt it might be the 5 cheap Deep Cool fans I originally installed so I dumped one of them and installed a Noctua NF-A12x25 fan and that seemed to fix the problem. Lately, I was given a RADEON XFX HD 6950 800M 2 GB DDR5 Dual MiniDP HDMI Dual DVI PCI-E Video Card. When I built the PC, I never installed a video card but decided to try running off the Intel chip. It’s worked fine but now I’m considering installing the video card but worried that I may have problems, perhaps with the power supply. Any advice would be really appreciated.

My system is as follows.

Z170 Pro4 Intel Z170 Chipset Socket LGA 1151 DDR4 64GB Desktop Motherboard

Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-6100 Skylake CPU @ 3.70GHz

HyperX FURY 8GB (2 x 4GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM 2666 (PC4 21300) Intel X99 Desktop Memory

Seagate Desktop HDD ST1000DM003 1TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

CORSAIR CSM Series CX500M 500W Modular PLUS Bronze Certified Modular Power Supply

SAMSUNG DVD Writer SATA Model SH-224FB/RSBS

Windows 10 Pro - 64 Bit OEM

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

CORSAIR CSM Series CX500M 500W Modular PLUS Bronze Certified Modular Power Supply
Is this the PSU you're working with;

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/p/psu/cp-9020059-na/cx-series-modular-cx500m-atx-power-supply-500-watt-80-plus-bronze-certified-modular-psu-cp-9020059-na

?

If so, you should look into a reliably built 650WPSU before dropping in that HD 6950 GPU, then again you could get a much more power efficient, concurrent GPU and drop it into your system but the need for a good quality PSU is without a doubt, necessary.

 

[ShiroTheWolf]

I agree with Ltfij here.
A more sufficient power supply is a must,
it paves the way for more upgrades in the future.
Also I would like to make a quick suggestion, seagate brand hard disk drives are bad news. If at all possible either look into getting a Western Digital HDD or switch to an SSD as soon as possible I have lost countless pictures and data to those drives way back in the day with replacements doing the same thing.

Cheers, hope things go well!

 

[Still-Tryn]

Thanks guys, I figured that PSU would probably cause problems if I installed that GPU. As for disk drive I'll give it some thought, but I've got a hub and 5 usb drives and anything important is backed up, but I'd hate to have to reload my software.

 

[ShiroTheWolf]

Thanks guys, I figured that PSU would probably cause problems if I installed that GPU. As for disk drive I'll give it some thought, but I've got a hub and 5 usb drives and anything important is backed up, but I'd hate to have to reload my software.

Thats good to have it backed up, better safe than sorry.
Also getting an SSD vastly improves load times, write speeds, and is way more reliable over time.
They sell them for dirt cheap nowadays on newegg.com I got 2 for $72 CAD each.