[NAME] Newbie  I think I can provide your with some 'real-time' info. System basically: XPS 8940 SE with the 500W PSU i7-11700 CPU 32GB's of RAM. 512GB SSD, 1 1TB Hard Drive, 1 4TB USB External Drive Dell OEM Nvidia RTX2060 6GB card Dell S3221SQ Monitor running at  3840x2160 resolution. That is all I think is pertinent, other than the RTX2060 6GB card is made for Dell by MSI. The physical card DOES NOT look at all like the Retail MSI card. One large Fan with heat sink behind it while the MIS Retail has 2 smaller fans. It is 'rumored', and I have NO proof of that, that Dell's card will draw less power. According to this site, [URL] , should draw 160W top and min. PSU is 400W. So I just tested what might be the largest usage (for me) of the video card. I loaded up MS's Flight Simulator 2020 and started a flight and then loaded my CyberPower UPS app to measure the load on the USP sees: [IMAGE] The TOTAL UPS load is only 258W's. I closed the Flight Sim and let the fans return to idle, the UPS load is only 102W's Take this as a data point. GPU's though can vary from vendor to vendor, and some might not even fit into the 8940, even if Dell sold the same model.          
Newbie here requesting guidance. Coming from a 7-8 year old i7-6700, I recently bought an open box Dell XPS 8940 with the i7-11700 from Microcenter. It came with the proprietary platinum 500W PSU, 8GB RAM, traditional 1TB hard disk drive, integrated graphics, and PCIe 3.0. I upgraded it with 32GB of RAM (2 sticks of 16GB DDR4-3200) and the Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB M.2 NVMe ssd (now my Win11 boot drive). My total cost with sales tax is $521 so far, and the original 7200rpm sata hdd is still in there. After doing 20+ hours of reading to learn much more about my 8940's limitations, my big concern is what video card can I safely use inside this new PC? To be brief, I've included optional info below the sign off. Thank you. 1. I'm actually good with stock power out of the box, and don't personally overclock or try to change stock values for the CPU or peripherals.2. Using the Outervision power supply calculator, it's guesstimated that my 8940's current power draw is 200W.(source: [URL] I've learned that the i7-11700 has a 65W tdp that can balloon to 224W tdp for up to 60 seconds under certain conditions. Can I use the bios/uefi to cap that to 100W to avoid the risk of nuking the stock 500W psu once I get a video card?4. Given #3, this 8940's tdp can go up to about 235W. Just to be safe and not get near the 500W limit, I'm guessing that the GPU can be up to 200W? I admit I could be totally wrong, and am also very concerned about excessive heat inside the 8940's mini tower5. Want, Not Need - I own a 1080p 165hz Christmas gift (LG Ultragear 32GN50T-B.AUS), and am curious to see what it's like to play games at 90fps or more since I've never, ever played them above 60fps.6. The more powerful the GPU, the better, but only if it's watt- and heat-safe under sustained loads (like transcoding hundreds of RAW photos or dozens of 2-3 minute video clips).
XPS 8940, 500W PSU, safe video card?