You need to ditch that power supply first. If you don't, you won't have enough cash left over to grab a new GPU that actually makes sense—you'll be stuck hunting for used parts. If you pick up a decent PSU for around $133, you could probably put somewhere between $200 toward a solid graphics card. What are you running right now?
It’ll work because the motherboard features a PCI-E x16 slot.
Could you let me know exactly which power supply you're running, what processor you have, and what kind of budget we're looking at for the graphics card?
There aren't many reviews floating around yet, but honestly, at this price point, who cares? It’s bound to outperform those budget Kingston V300 drives.
Paul Howard7 said:I downloaded everything relevant from the Dell website, but I might have missed something. Which specific driver do I need to get my Wi-Fi working?
It’s definitely a missing driver. Head over to the official Dell support site and search specifically for your model. You'll likely see several different options listed, so if one doesn't work, keep trying the others until you find the right match. Also, double-check that you haven't accidentally toggled the WLAN switch off—on most Dell laptops, that's usually located right along the edge near the touchpad.
When you enter the BIOS, is there an option to toggle between UEFI and Legacy modes? If so, try switching it. I went through absolute hell with a Toshiba my cousin had; turns out nothing would boot until I changed the BIOS type. The catch is that those specific settings often aren't available in the factory-default BIOS 🤣 . Basically, you have to run a BIOS update first (which was what he wanted to trigger immediately), and once that's done, the option to switch to Legacy mode finally appears. Only then will the OS installation actually boot . It could also be something incredibly trivial : - ensure the Windows media isn't corrupted and was created correctly - check if the USB is actually bootable (you can handle that using a tool like Rufus) - or simply make sure you actually hit a key when prompted to start the installation
That’s exactly why I’m saying you should sell it while it actually still holds some value. Let's be real: in a year or two, it'll be worth next to nothing—nobody is going to drop serious cash on it then. You're only really in trouble once something actually breaks. I assume it still carries that standard one-year Apple warranty, plus those two years of consumer protection laws we have here in the US regarding merchant liability for defects
It shouldn't really matter if you hit a bit of a bottleneck since it was essentially free. You don't look a gift horse in the mouth, right? 😬 Alternatively, you could put that money toward an SSD—that might actually be a smarter investment. To be honest, there are a few games out there where you'd really struggle to even max out the performance of that Radeon R7 260.
His CPU is an Intel Core I5 Processor speed, which means he's running on that mobile FCBGA1364 platform, and his graphics are Iris (check out the gaming benchmarks below). Honestly, if you're looking to game, spending 10K on this would be a massive waste of money. At 768p, you can get quite a few newer titles to run at a playable 30 FPS on medium settings. However, some heavier titles won't even budge on low settings, even if you drop the resolution
I’m just not following—what exactly do you have on hand right now? Are you actually keeping that power supply or what? Honestly, at that price point, you could probably find much better options elsewhere. And regarding that AMD A8-3870, is it included in the deal or is that an extra cost? If it's extra, how much are we talking? Look, for the price of two sodas, you could basically overhaul the entire platform and just hold onto the RAM, then sell off everything else to break even.
Of course you can. Just search for the game title plus the GPU model and "benchmark." Or just head over to YouTube and look it up.
Just make sure you install the latest updates. A lot of games launch feeling like half-finished products, but they usually patch them later to fix bugs and boost performance.
In the context of this specific game and those particular graphics cards, the processor doesn't really matter—there won't be any noticeable difference.
Both GPUs are in the same tier, so you can't go wrong either way. The Witcher 3 tends to run slightly better on NVIDIA, while Far Cry 4 performs better on an AMD card of the same level.
There’s just no way to make that work for around $75. Trying to stretch a budget that far to reach an R9 290 is a losing battle, especially since he'd need a beefier power supply too. Honestly, his budget is already blown as it is.
Don't go with that RealPower unit. I think some guy on a forum wrote a review about it somewhere; you should probably dig through the threads and find it. Honestly, it sounds like you were using a Shrotex before, which was obviously noisy. Any decent, relatively high-quality power supply will be quiet enough for you.
It’s pretty obvious that Seagate/Western Digital manufactured this hard drive 🤷
Back in December 2011, Seagate picked up Western Digital's HDD business.
If you want to see how they handle their branding, check out this ad link (though honestly, that's more for the corporate types than someone just walking into a Best Buy)
My best guess? Samsung likely built the drive, and since Seagate bought out Western Digital's HDD division while that specific model was still in its prime, they just kept using both names to move stock. It's a classic move—kind of like when Intel bought through acquisitions and brands overlapped for a while until consumers finally got used to the new logo on the websites and store shelves.