Is the Antec BP350 PSU good enough for the Radeon HD 4650 1GB Video Card?

Yea i want to get this card for my computer and my parents just bought this PSU for my computer. Will it be enough to run this Video Card? Because i heard the PSU matters with them and i don't want to open it if it wont even be enough. And my computer is the HP Pavilion a6238x.|||You'd be fine with that Antec 350W psu.



First of all, the "official" published 400W recommendation for the Radeon HD 4650 is complete nonsense! The 4600 series cards don't use anywhere NEAR that much power.



400W is a vastly inflated number that ATI chose to publish simply to allow for extreme cases- people with heavily overclocked CPUs and RAID arrays of 4-6 drives, lots of neon case lighting and 4 optical drives, configurations like that. And also to account for computers with very low-quality power supplies which underperform their rating substantially like Diablotek, Broadway Com, Eagle, Logisys etc.



In systems like those, you could conceivably need 400 watts... not regular computers with a decent psu running a quad-core or lower CPU at stock speed, single hard drive and DVD drive. In typical systems, total system power consumption with a HD 4650 installed is under 225 watts... And that's PEAK power usage, not average! Even keeping in mind that many generic psus can only deliver 80% of their advertised power rating on a sustained basis, 350 watts is WELL in the clear.



http://www.techspot.com/review/245-ati-r…



Don't forget... the Radeon HD 5670 has much higher performance (and power draw) than either the Radeon HD 4670 or 4650.



Yet the 5670 itself has an official power supply requirement of 400 watts, too!



Look at actual power consumption test results from Anandtech, Xbitlabs, Tom's Hardware, Techspot, Hot Hardware, Guru3D etc and you'll discover that the faster HD 4670 runs fine on 350W psus, while the 4650 runs fine on 300W units.



Read through some of the user reviews on Newegg- many people have successfully run the 4650 on 250 watt power supplies, but that's dicey. Most of those people had slimline computers with low power draw CPUs, running low-profile versions of the 4650.



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as…



However, I recommend skipping the 4650. If you can only afford $50 or thereabouts, grab the GeForce GT220 which is about 10% faster.



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as…



If you can afford to spend a little more, go for the Radeon HD 5570 or even better, GeForce GT440 (about equivalent to the Radeon HD 5670). And good news for those who trust manufacturer's published requirements more than actual test results---- the GeForce GT440 has an official psu requirement of just 300 watts :)



http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as…

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as…



Performance:

http://www.techspot.com/review/245-ati-r…|||Gideon D is not far off, but graphics cards suppliers always overstate their power requirements. If you got only one HDD and one optical drive you should be OK.



Another thing worth checking is the power connectors on the PSU and the power connectors required by the graphics card, and the rest of your pc's bits and bobs.



I recently moved up to a 700w psu but it had only one 4 pin square connector and my new graphics card required two so I had to get a IDE power splitter cable and an IDE to 4 pin square adapter - cost me another tenner. but I got lots of hard disks and dual optical drives in my rig.



Some graphics cards do come with power adapters.|||http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/g…



Requires 400 watts or better. You have a 350. Not a good idea.