Best graphics card for an HP Pro 3400 MT

[thtimberwolf]

I have a HP 3400 MT. The motherboard is a HP/Foxconn 2ABF (I assume this is the cupertino2 motherboard). The power supply is 633189-001 300 W . I do not know much about power supply rails. I am currently running Windows 8. The processor is a i5-2300. It has 8 GB of G.Skill Ripjaws memory. The micro architecture is Sandy Bridge.

The current GPU is Intel Graphics HD. Without upgrading my power supply what is the highest graphics card I can put in my machine. I do not plan on overclocking any of the components

I have heard that the motherboards bios will not support the 700 series for nvidia. which led me to believe that the highest Nvidia GPU I could place in my system would be the GT 630.

As for Radeon I am not sure what the highest I could use. I have heard HD 5450, HD 6450, HD 7750 and HD7570. I am not sure what the motherboard bios limit is for the Radeon series.


I am also unsure of which board partner to go with. Whether I should go fan or fanless? I am looking for a video card in the 1Gb to 2 GB of VRAM range.

I have been asking on the HP forum, the Nvidia forum and the AMD forum without no responses or help.

If there are any better ones I am open to suggestions.

Gaming: Skyrim
Other uses: watching movies

 

[Calculagator]

MSI apparently makes some models of the GTX 750 and 750ti that have a legacy bios switch that allows them to work with old HP bioses. Those would definitely be better than the other options you give. There are a number of posts on HPs forums with links.
For these low end GPUs the amount of VRAM is pretty insignificant. They aren't powerful enough to use it. What is important is they type of VRAM. Low end cards that use (G)DDR3 instead of GDDR5 will have much lower performance even if they have more RAM.

 

[thtimberwolf]

Doesn't the MSI GTX 750 and 750ti require a 400W minimum power supply or do they have fanless ones?

 

[Calculagator]

Doesn't the MSI GTX 750 and 750ti require a 400W minimum power supply or do they have fanless ones?

The cards themselves use less than 65W. Unless you really stress your system, you should be fine with 300W. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to upgrade your PSU anyways.