I’m a computer programmer DB analyst. Not a hardware guy. But I have added ram, swapped hard drives, installed network cards and stuff. Not a lot, but I’m not afraid of the guts of the machine.
I go through periods of wanting to play new computer games, and periods when I don’t touch them for a couple of years.
I’m in my gaming period.
I recently purchased an HP ENVY TE01-1xxx i7-10700 CPU @ 2.9 GHz
16 GB RAM.
Base graphics card on it, no upgrade there, and no power upgrade, but it does run a 43 inch monitor (I bought the big monitor for working from home).
A recent game I bought will not run. It needs DXR1.1 graphics.
Looks like I need an upgrade of the graphics card, and possibly the power output as well (not sure about that, think I have to get in the box to look at the watts.)
~ with back ground done, on to the questions.
I’m wondering if a good graphics card would fit in the machine. And what brand I should buy. Mostly, I worried if it’s going to fit. Shouldn’t be a problem, I donno.
Also worried about power and if a higher wattage power supply would take up more room.
Does it look like it takes a standard power supply (obviously you will want 750W or even more)?
I have crammed graphics cards in systems which were not designed to have them :), obviously you still need the PCI Express slot, but you have to worry about heat/ventilation (vs a compact gaming system with water cooling) and cable routing. Do you have an old graphics card to test with? If it works then, you can put in a more recent 3080 or whatever (there was a thread recently listing brands and prices…)
I bought the HP ENVY on Amazon. All I upgraded was RAM and storage. I have no idea what the power supply is or what it may need for a decent graphics card.
Looking online, it seems that you have to break it open to see how many watts the power supply is. I don’t know if a new/bigger power supply would fit or work, or what kind to look at. Same with the graphics card. What is a mid-range graphics card for gaming?
I had no idea that I would have to upgrade the power supply for a better graphics card. I bumped into that online.
If it’s the HP Envy Deaktop, it has very little expndability. The power supply is not ATX and uses a proprietary HP connector. HP has upgrade power supplies, and Wal-Mart of all places appears to have a cheap 460W power supply for the Envy E8, if that’s what you have.
By recently, do you mean like a year and a half ago? Ideally you could post a link to what you bought so we could read the spec sheet.
A more definitive way we could tell would be if you pop the cover off and take a few pictures. We should be able to see the PCI slot you’d plug a graphics card into plain as day, as well as show you where to measure to see how long a video card will fit.
What resolution do you want to game in, and what is your budget? Right at this moment, 1080p would run you around $350, 1440p would be more like $600, and I’m not sure on 2k but I’d guess around $800, maybe? (1080p on a 43" screen sounds like a travesty.)
You absolutely, positively cannot game with the onboard Intel chipset graphics. Well, actually, you could probably run games released in 2012 or earlier, but nothing modern.
Unfortunately this may be a situation where you want to do a NASCAR race in a VW Beetle. Most consumer desktop machines from the big names (Dell, HP, etc.) are just designed to do a particular level of computing and that’s it. Little to no expandability. If you want to game with a brand name computer you’ll need to buy a gaming system from them (which is pricey).
Gaming hobbyists generally build a machine from parts or go to a shop that builds them. I got my start in IT over 20 years ago at such a place.
I thought, where can I get honest input on gaming machines and knowlege last night. I’m very glad I thought of the Dope. I never come to the Game Room.
So I started digging some more. Could not find a paper invoice, and the machine itself only says HP ENVY TE01-1xxx. Not very helpful. The xxx would be upgrades on purchase I assume.
Sooooo… I went to the the HP site and I DID create an account when I purchased it on 10/28/2020. It’s an HP ENVY Desktop TE01-1175xt PC.
Specs says that it has a -
Discrete: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1660 SUPER™ (6 GB GDDR6 dedicated)
A pretty good graphics card I think…
Would that support DXR1.1 graphics? I’m starting to think that it doesn’t support the graphics used in the game Metro Exodus Enhanced Addition. I know very little about the game (looked interesting), I just downloaded it the other day and got the DXR1.1 error when I tried to run it.
I don’t think that’s even consistent with code-- I thought that all devices were required to have a label listing the power draw somewhere on the case near where the power cord comes out.
Should work; try updating the NVIDIA drivers. Also who knows what they did to it if it was a torrent version (I realise some “pirate” versions are unofficial patches or hacks designed to improve the gameplay experience or increase compatibility, but did you really check where the patch came from if you bypassed the official Steam client?)
Think I will just dump this game. When you open it it gives you wonderful graphics on a 43" screen, and then lock the machine up. Got to boot to get out of it.
Thanks for the reminder about Belarc. It’s been awhile. Gonna move on from this for sure.
I like wasting a little time now and then. But I don’t like spending time so I can waste time.
Metro Exodus Enhanced is, as I recall, designed for GPUs able to handle ray tracing. The 1660 Super does not qualify. You want to run the standard edition of Metro Exodus.
Edit to confirm:
Please note – the Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition requires Ray Tracing capable hardware as the minimum spec
Mind you, there’s a bajillion other games you CAN play (including the non-enhanced edition of Metro Exodus), you just happened upon one of the very few you’re actually walled off from.
The Enhanced version came as a free download for people who owned the standard version so it’s very possible you own the base version. I don’t think it’s possible to buy the Enhanced version as a stand-alone product.
Assuming you can find a PSU that fits (I don’t know if it’s standard dimensions or could put a small form factor PSU in there), making a PSU fit with weird proprietary motherboards can often be accomplished with a $10 adapter. I’ve done it multiple times with Dells and assume an HP would be much the same (different wiring on the adapter, of course). Might be out of the comfort zone of a first time upgrader, though.
Yeah that’s a real card, you should be fine to start poking around at least. It’s not great – you’re probably looking at 1080p – but it’s light years ahead of the onboard graphics I thought you had.
(I realise some “pirate” versions are unofficial patches or hacks designed to improve the gameplay experience or increase compatibility, but did you really check where the patch came from if you bypassed the official Steam client?)