Can my motherboard support a 950ti/1050ti? Need advice

[thehoneypoet]

I'm trying to upgrade my Graphics card from a Radeon R7 240(This is my first upgrade). I'm going for either a GTX 980 ti or possibly a 1050 ti but I'm not sure if my motherboard will support them. I've got a 16x1 PCIE slot, a PCIE 1x1 and a MINI_PCIE1 slot. I'm not sure exactly if I need extra hardware or what I have will work. Please Help

 

[gussrtk]

I wouldn't worry about your motherboard, if you are running an r7-240 then we could assume that you have a good enough motherboard (you could go into your bios and see the model number of your Motherboard to be sure). But if you are going with possibly a GTX980ti, you need to check your Power Supply for sure, a 980ti draws much more power than the r7 graphics card. Most likely you have a power supply to support your graphics card only, moving to a higher power draw card will result in a needed upgrade (probably 35-60$ for the PSU).

But all of this being said, it would help if you would list the rest of your ssytem to confirm everything will work good together.

 

[thehoneypoet]

I wouldn't worry about your motherboard, if you are running an r7-240 then we could assume that you have a good enough motherboard (you could go into your bios and see the model number of your Motherboard to be sure). But if you are going with possibly a GTX980ti, you need to check your Power Supply for sure, a 980ti draws much more power than the r7 graphics card. Most likely you have a power supply to support your graphics card only, moving to a higher power draw card will result in a needed upgrade (probably 35-60$ for the PSU).

But all of this being said, it would help if you would list the rest of your ssytem to confirm everything will work good together.

Well, My processor is a Intel i7-4790 CPU Haswell, my motherboard is an Acer Aspire TC 705. I'm really not sure what other information you might need, I'm very new at this. Any chance I might be able to run the 1050?

 

[gussrtk]

You have 2 problems,

1. Power supply unit in your PC is rated to output low wattage, this might be a problem when upgrading some components to those that draw more power. A 1050ti may work on your PC, you could order one, try it (i'm sure it'll boot), the problem would be when you game and put your system under load, If that power supply has weak quality build / or / your system starves for power, you'll get a restart. So then you can buy yourself a better power supply (like I said, about 30-60$ will be enough for a new one). [the r7 240 graphics card is fairly close to a gtx1050ti non 6 pin power draw, so it's worth a try in that sense]

2. being that you don't know about external power connectors for video cards. These come from power supplies, they are called 6pin connectors (by most people). All of PSUs have it today (maybe not a 10$ PSU... but not gonna involve that). So you would have to buy a graphics card that does not require a 6pin connector (only lower end cards do not require extra connectors. GTX1050 has a mix of some requiring and others not, because it is a low power draw card, but when they are overclocked, they sometimes surpass the limit of what the motherboard can feed to the card), this would be specified in the technical details of a graphics card (need to do some looking). I do think there are 1050ti with no extra power needed, but I may be wrong, need to check.

Any graphics card that is on a higher tier (like your 980ti suggestion), will automatically need you to upgrade your power supply. I would personally just go ahead and upgrade the power supply and get yourself a decent GPU, your i7 will still game pretty good for a 2-3 more years, might as well make use of what it's got to offer.