Hi, I have found that the 7850 has quite good specs, and seeing as I've never built a mining rig before, I thought it would be a cheap enough card to give it a first go with.
My questions are
1. I have a PSU of 350 watts. According to
litecoin.info, the 7850 only needs 100-something watts... but according to the
official AMD spec, it requires 500 or 600 watts.... Why does litecoin.info report much lower watts, and what is the true watts required?
This is because AMD (and nVidia too) are addressing the majority of their customers. This majority lacks technical knowledge to optimize their PC so by writing that you need almost twice the power consumption they make sure that when a person sees their card and sees 600w power consumption, he's buy a big enough PSU to not only power his card but also to power the rest of his PC and have enough room to not push his PSU to the limit - at least, that's how I see it (I could be wrong).
Anyway, from what I could find, the HD 7850 is indeed cheap on electricity, so yes, if I had to guess I'd say your 350w PSU should be able to get your whole system running when mining. Although keep in mind that if it's a low quality PSU it might not actually push 350w through it.
2. My motherboard is the
Dell 0m017g, and it says it has 1x PCI x16 slot, and I've checked it myself to see a long PCI-looking slot... But I just wanted to double check whether this is the right slot for the 7850.
Thanks.
Yes it is, and your question is quite basic for building any PC so I suggest you go watch some tutorials on youtube on how to build a PC (mining rig is really quite similar for the most part).
