Upgrade of Graphics Card for dual HDMI monitors?

[Matrixunloaded]

I purchased a Pavilion 590-P0047C today. The specs on the 590 say the power supply is 310 Watts.  

1. Can I  upgrade the installed AMD Radeon 520 graphics card with a different "low profile PCB with ATX, LP bracket" in order to run my  existing two HDMI monitors that I now run in an expanded  single desktop mode. 

2. If so, is there a suitable graphics card that I can use? I don't care if it has dual DVI, or dual HDMI, or one DVI and one HDMI,  as long as I can use both of the connectors with the two HDMI monitors in as an expanded single desktop.

If I can't, there's no use unpacking the PC. I'll just return it and buy a suitable PC elsewhere.

Many thanks for any help!

[old_geekster]

@Matrixunloaded, welcome to the forum.

Here is a video card that has the two HDMI ports that you want and it states that it will run with a 300W power supply unit.  I suggest that you contact the manufacturer's Tech Support to see what they have to say about it working with your bracket.  It is a bit different.  I don't want you to buy the card and have to return it.

Please click the Thumbs up + button if I have helped you and click Accept as Solution if your problem is solved.

[jtpolk · Accepted solution]

I have looked at upgrading a HP Pavilion 590-p0057c, which is basically the Intel i5-8400 version of what you have, but comes with a Radeon RX 550. Based on what I can figure out, you can upgrade the card with something like a Radeon RX 550 or 560, or Nividia 1050 or 1050TI, and no more. That is to keep the total WATTS of your system at about the industry recommendation that all of your components of your system not exceed 80 percent of the total power your PSU can supply. The interesting thing is that the Radeon 520 has mainly been used by notebooks, so I could not find out much other than what HP specifies, which is that it's total power draw is 30W. For instance, my 590-p0057c's Radeon RX 550 is rated to draw 75W.  According to estimates of a system similiar to yours built by a site that calculates the wattage of a system as you pick the pc parts, you are drawing about 215 watts, which should give you some headroom, vis a vis going up against the 80 percent wattage recommendation.

I hope that some of this helps in your deliberations.

enjoy!

[Matrixunloaded]

Thanks so much for the detailed response. You confirmed my fears. Why HP puts in so minimal a power supply amazes me. I thought PC's purchase price I found it for ($200 off the retail) was a reasonable price but by the time I add in the cost of the replacement video card and push the 80% threshold on the PS, it's no longer a bargain. I've already returned the HP PC to the big box store and elected to go with the build up the full tower with decent components. This exercise convinced me to stay away from the small form factors because of the constraints  it imposes on components. Again, many thanks!

[jtpolk]

Glad I could be of help. In answer to your question about the PSU, the phrase that comes to mind is "built to purpose". The 310 Watt PSU is good for this computing machine, yet still offers a number of upgrades, and keeps the price reasonable!

I've added an NVMe PCIe x4 SSD to my system and am thinking of upgrading the 3.5 HHD to a larger size sometime in the future.  But the big thing is that there is one thing I didn't need: a video card upgrade.

The most heavy lifting I do is with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, and except for a few Photoshop filters and doing large Lightroom exports, really don't need much of a video card. And most of my RAW files I have learned to store on external USB storage, using spinning rust, i.e. traditional 3.5in HDDs, and there the biggie for me was having USB 3.1 gen 1 (aka 5Gbs).

Frankly I could not even get close to the price building a system using individual components.

In any case, happy tinkering...

enjoy!