[SOLVED] [ANSWERED] Running a GT 1030 on a 280w PSU.

[ItsZed01]

This is my second post on the forums, and I was just wondering... Since I wanna upgrade an old office PC that I have laying around, I was thinking if I can put a GT 1030 in there to make its performance better. The specs are going to be: Core 2 Quad Q9650 (or Q9550) since it's all I need for now. Both of those have a TDP of 95W. And I'm not sure if that is the way to tell how much power it uses. I will possibly have a 1TB HDD and a 240GB SSD as a boot drive. I will have 8GB DDR3 RAM. + An Optical Drive. The model of my PC is a Lenovo M58P (Small form factor). I just wanted to show an example of what it looks like. Thank you in advance!

 

[punkncat]

Have you already verified that the card you are selecting is half height/low profile (or smaller) and will actually fit inside the PC you wish to put it in?

I am not familiar with that specific PC but often found they have ZERO room inside for much of anything. Even the much larger "DT" type form cases don't generally have room between the PCI slot and the PSU or side of the enclosure.
This type of "install" may actually require you to heavily mod/cut up the existing case or even have to take the components out entirely.
Keep in mind that the power supply in that SFF is as old and outdated as the Core 2 Quad it's running. Even with that GPU this wouldn't be a built suited towards any manner of modern game. I am sure the performance of that Core series along with missing instruction sets would make it unable to even load most.

My own opinion is that a machine of that age is probably best left to retirement and recycling.

 

[ItsZed01]

Thank you for your response.
I will obviously get a single slot LP version. I have seen other people fit similar cards in here, (single slot), and no modding was needed. But, in my opinion it handles everything I play perfectly fine. This power supply managed to handle a good 5 years or even more for now. I checked to make sure everything can fit multiple times. All I really just wanted to ask is if it would work with that PSU.

 

[tennis2]

GeForce GT 1030 | Specifications | GeForce

Check out the latest NVIDIA GeForce technology specifications, system requirements, and more.

www.nvidia.com

The GT1030 has a 30W TDP. You should be fine with a 280W PSU (it's probably not actually 280W where it matters, you multiply the +12V amperage on the sticker by 12 and get the "usable" wattage)

Since the system is OEM SFF, most likely the x16 slot is limited to 25-30W output anyway.

 

[ItsZed01]

I see. Thank you for responding!