GTX 1050TI on a 240W power supply?

Bread-Businesslike-Receipt · October 29, 2020

Hello, I currently have a GT710 running inside a HP 6200 Pro SFF machine. It can cut a 1080i timeline fine for about 8 minutes of video, but anything more than that, and Resolve throws a GPU memory full error. I'd like to upgrade to a 1050TI ideally, as it has 4gb VRAM, which I presume should be more than enough for me. I've done some research, and found some annecdotal evidence of people successfully getting this to work, a lot of them say it went very well. However, I have 2 limitations. The recomended PSU for that card is 300W - I have 240 - but seen as it pulls solely from PCIe, I'd guess that my board can supply enough power to run it (maybe I'm wrong there?). If I needed to upgrade the PSU, there is no way of doing it as HP used a wierd non-standard one for this machine that is only available in 240w versions I believe. I don't do any gaming whatsoever, so any gaming performance doesn't matter to me. Another thought I'd had was potentially a 1030. I know somone with the same machine, who runs a 1030 2GB absolutely fine, but I want to make this my last GPU upgrade for a while, and I don't know if it'd meet all of my requirements. Any help/similar stories would be appreciated. Thanks.

xhackforeverxdx · October 29, 2020

It draws 75 watts from the pci slot ( the max a pci slot handels ) a i5-2400 pulls around 75 watts aswell so your at 150 and since the rest of your system does not draw alot i would say it should be fine fineish as long as the Power supply isnt the worst of the worst but 240 is really low ^^

mariushm · October 29, 2020

It would probably work fine.

The GT1050 consumes around 65-75w if my memory is correct, while the GT 710 consumes a bit less, maybe around 40 watts... not sure, the 760 consumes up to 60 watts.

It's all about how much all the other components in your system consume ... let's say 80w for cpu, 10-20w for motherboard (chipset, onboard sound, network etc), 2w per memory stick , 10w for each mechanical drive, 2-3w for each SSD, around 1-2w for each fan.

The recommendation for 300w is because nVidia can't know how much of that 300w is reserved for 3.3v and 5v, and how much is available on 12v - the cpu and video card and fans work on 12v... so if someone buys a cheap 300w that has 100w reserved for 3.3v and 5v, only 200w are left for 12v.

That HP power supply should have at least 200w of that 240w available on 12v, so it should be enough.

No, NEVER go with a 1030, it lacks hardware encoder, which you could use to accelerate encoding videos

As alternatives, a RX 550 will consume up to ~45w, the 560 goes up to 70-80 watts

Both the 1050ti and the RX cards can be tweaked to reduce power consumption, there's a power slider you can use to go +- 5% or something like that, so you could shave a few watts should you have to.

Bread-Businesslike-Receipt · October 29, 2020

Brilliant, thanks to everyone for their replies! I have done some further reading, and aparently the BIOS can be a bit funny about the newer cards. It seemed to be fine in my freind's one with a 1030, but I'm not sure what to do. I'd consider myself quite technical, but wouldn't have the first idea about how to get around this issue! I guess I should just buy whatever card I go for from a retailer with a solid returns policy. I also have something in the back of my mind that says this slot may have a 25W limit, but I am not sure of that. I could well be thinking of another board there, besides, I think cards can configure themselves as needing more than 25. Thanks again everyone for your speedy replies.