As title, a bit of help needed 
Mrs Gizmo has let me loose with just short of £200 for a new graphics card for my birthday in a few weeks 
Any ideas? Space in the rig isn’t a problem, but i only have a 500w PSU (can be upgraded at a push).
I have been looking at Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 Windforce 4GB Card @£172 but i thought i would run it by you bunch of drunken tarts first in case i missed anything blindingly obvious 
Looks like a good value card from what I can read of it. It needs its own power source and the 500w might not be enough depending on what you are intending to use alongside it in the case. Even having multiple hard drives will draw some power away from the system and I actually had a mchine that would not POST due to lack of power and would only co-operate if I disconnected one of the hard drives. Have you a list of the current components?
Currently sat inside this build is -
AMD FX-8120 3.1GHz
8 gig RAM (dual channel)
2 x 500gb SATA HD’s
1 x optical drive
Gigabyte GA-78LMT - USB 3 mobo
GT 640 gfx card
500W Coolermaster PSU
I was seriously hit hard in the pocket shortly after buying the CPU and the rest of the build ended up being a scramble to cobble something together as cheap as possible. 
But the end result wasn’t too shabby to be honest for under £200 with the salvaged gfx card and HD’s from an old machine 
EDIT : Yeah, looks like a new PSU will be needed, but shouldn’t be an issue 
960 4GB should do for a while assuming you don’t want to push resolutions beyond 1080p. I had a 2GB one on a 1920x1200 monitor which was fine, until I upgraded the monitor… 4GB would be a bit more future-resistant.
I also wouldn’t worry about power. Even factory OC ones shouldn’t push beyond 150W or so, allowing same again for CPU (being extremely generous) and you’re still only at 300W. The rest of stuff hardly adds up.
I was looking further down the specs on the website and noticed this…
System Requirements Power Requirement: 400W (with one 6-pin external power connector)
:eek:
Sounds like it will work OK from what you’ve got. The 960 is a decent card and as I said a great price. I paid £86 for a 650Ti with 4gb GDDR5 RAM this year and I wish I’d had the option of the 960 then, but at the time, they were pushing close to £300 for a similar card. As Mackerel said it should give you some future proof at least.
To be clear, that was a suggestion of a 400W system PSU, not that the card needs 400W! The PCIe slot delivers around 75W, and the PCIe power connector can deliver about same again. Hence assuming around 150W for a factory OC card, the TDP according to nvidia is actually lower than that.
Ah Ha! :doh:
I thought it looked a bit hefty on the power consumption! :lol:
If it was 400W I wouldn’t have gone anywhere near one! Even the R9 280X I have is something like 275W, and that really warms the room up. I’m saving that for when things get cooler
Going by my 2x GTX980 in sli you won’t get near the 120watts the GTX960 is rated at.
Perfectly fine on the 500Watts PSU
