Been a while! Alienware X51 R2 upgrading.

[Duality92]

So, a friend of mine ended up giving a bare minimum Alienware X51 R2 to me. It has an i5 4150, 6GB of RAM and GTX 645, ..., lol.

Well, my vision of this tiny PC is that I could upgrade it, fast forward to today, I fit a GTX 1070 in that thing, bought a 2*4GB RAM kit and an i5 4690S (both of which I'm still waiting to get).

Now, I remember my 8600K rig with a 1070 would draw 320W from the wall, in a Node 202, but can I realistically power this rig with the 240W power brick it has? I got the "S" CPU on purpose for lower TDP and I'm thinking I can underclock that 1070 to get under 240W. What do you guys think?

 

[GuilleAcoustic]

I have no experience with undervolting, but 240W seems a bit optimistic to me. S series 4th gen are still 65 "Intel TDP" watts, so when not using turbo. But I like to be proven wrong so I'll keep an eye on this

EDIT: Found this on internet from a guy asking for the same thing. This is the reply he got from Alienware / Dell :

These are the validated cards for your system:

nVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 645 (Standard)
nVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 660
nVIDIA® Geforce™ GTX 670 (with 330W adapter)
Intel® HD Graphics 4400/4600
nVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 745
nVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 960
nVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 750 Ti
nVIDIA® GeForce™ GTX 760 Ti
AMD Radeon™ R9 270
AMD Radeon™ R9 270x
AMD Radeon™ R9 370x

Unofficially a GTX1060 will be the highest you can use, just remember that the card's length should be equal or less that 9,5''.

 

[Duality92]

It boots at least right now with a 1070 and i3, but I've only used Linux and haven't installed and benchmark yet to test.

 

[Duality92]

well it runs Valley benchmark in a loop fine with the i3 4130 and 1070. I don't see the i5 4690S and 2GB more RAM making it fail! I have high hopes!

 

[Duality92]

Well, delidded and LM'd 4590S, 8GB RAM and GTX 1070, and what was actually a 180W brick ends up tripping a protection, kill-a-watt says power draws between 190-210 on Borderlands 3. So the 240W would surprisingly be enough. The 4590S under stress tests only reaches 49C after 10+ minutes, LM really doing it's job!

I repasted the GPU too, but I'm not really seeing any gains, previous owner must've already pasted it. So, 330W brick bought off CanadianHardwareSwap on Reddit and will be my last addition before I settle it in my living room!

I'm really surprised on this project, it ended up costing me a total of 178$ CAD for this type of performance.

My next question is the most powerful GPU the would physically fit in this case? 265mm long maximum, 110mm max width and one PCIE 8-pin.