need some help with my viao

[mike68]

well i have a VGC-RA820G vaio. ill give you geuss a link in a sec. well im runing on 1.5 gigs of ram and everything else in my comp is pretty good for gaming except for my PSU and vid card. my PSU is 350W and i have a ATI x300 pci exp. now im so sick of lag in every game i play, and ive been considering buying a new PSU and vid card. but with the viaos uique design i dont know if i can put new PSU in it... also i wanted to know if the liquid cooling system is hooked up to the PSU that is currently in there. because i dont want to get rid of it, if any of you know, this particular viao is silent, i mean you can hardly hear it except on startup. heres a link to some info on the compCNET REVIEW when i first looked at the current PSU in my viao i was confused, i mean i dont know if its just mounted differently than others or if it is a PSU that was custom built for the viao.

i really appreciate the help guys. i just want to get this baby to play some BF2 cranked up.

 

[Nextman916]

Vaio's psu are proprietary, normal form factor psu's will NOT fit inside. My other comp is a vaio and before i got a new rig, 2 yrs back i tried to upgrade the vaio(which had a 250w max psu). But soon found out that their psu could not be replaced, I bought a normal atx psu, no luck, nor did mini atx do the trick. I contacted their customer service and they said that their parts are proprietary and did not recommend replacing anything inside(which of course every company says), but in this case there was no possiblity. You could contact them for a higher upgrade psu made by them perhaps, but i had no luck with that, they denied me the fact that they had any higher end psu's and asked if i wanted to buy the same make for $115! I just hung up.....check your current rating for your psu maybe you could get a midrange card without having to change the psu. hope that helps.

 

[mike68]

damn... that just crushed my spirits right there. hm, i know i can get a 7600 GT but i would be Border lined fith the minimal PSU recomendation. damnit sony why do you have to be so complicated! sheesh now what do i do... im going to have to upgrade my PSU someday... oh well, thx a lot for the info man

 

[mike68]

anybody know any decent cards that can run on 360W?? i mean the best that can run on something that small

 

[Nextman916]

360w is plenty for a 7600gt, even if you planned to overclock, or an x1800gto for the matter. If 150-$200 is your price range of course
7600gt- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283
x1800gto- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102013
X850xt- http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102688
Those are links for the best deals around, i would choose the x850xt especially for BF2 which it handles very very well. Any other games you plan on playing? Lack of sm 3.0 could be somewhat of a dissapointment, but a 7600gt or the gto wouldnt handle HDR and sm3.0 features past anything this generation with playable frames. Dont worry if the cards recommend 350w or higher, thats assumed under a fully loaded system not for the card alone, they have to take account for all the systems out there, including Pentium D's running at 3.3ghz. I dont have the time to figure out what exactly you have in your system, but you can use this- http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculator.jsp A pretty accurate rating of how much power your system consumes.

 

[mike68]

thanks so much man, i was going to go for the 7600 GT, but now im considering the X850XT. hm, im going to look at some bench marks and stuff. but thanks again for all the help man, i really appreciate it. matter of fact, when i get one of these cards within the next week or two ill PM you and tell you how they are.

 

[Nextman916]

Deal, I can tell you off the top of my head that the 7600gt outperforms the x1800gto without aa/af, but with aa/af enabled x1800gto outperforms it, but opengl games like Doom 3 or Q4 Nvidia always wins still. The x850xt is very fast but loud at startup, and somewhat noisy still, offers performance over both the 7600gt and the x1800gto but a minor OC's on both can fix that. The 7600gt being from Nvidia offers purevideo options which i think are better than ATi's AVIVO, so if you watch HD content, even if you dont, its a very cool feature to have. As soon as i got my 7800gs i installed purevideo and watched and dled all the sample 720p content movies i could find.:Q But wtv the decision is all up to you in the end, pm me to tell me what works out.

Phil