WHY WONT IT WORK (gaming knowledge recommended)

[mikeneedshelp]

i recently bought a

Gateway - Desktop / Intel® Core™ i5 Processor / 8GB Memory / 1TB Hard Drive

 

Towers Only - BestBuy

 

and upgraded the graphics card to a radeon 5450 2GB DDR3 so i would be able to play bad company 2 on max and also to play battlefield 3. However after i installed it and tried to play bad company 2 on max i was extremely disappointed that i was watching a slide show. the only way i can run bad company 2 is to run it on low which is truly terrible. i got so frustrated that i stopped trying to run games in fear that i might hurt the computer internals. i think the problem might be that i don't have sufficient power going to it. if someone could help me out by checking into this problem that would be great. or if they could find a different problem that would also be great.

 

ps. what does insufficient power supply do and if that's the problem what should i do to fix it. Also im a little concerned about my graphics card since it didnt come with a fan, should i be worried about this and return it?

[Plastic Nev]

Hi,

OK I am no gamer, or up to speed on graphics cards, however what I do know is the card itself may well be way under what you need for those games.

I assume the card is the same as this one here

 

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5450-overview/pages/hd-5450-overview.aspx#1

 

The specifications and system requirements show that it only needs a power supply of 400 watts, if your power supply is lower than that, then of course you will need to replace it with one of at least that 400 watts. However I would have expected a good gaming card to require a bit more than that.

I will of course leave this for someone who knows more about graphics, but my guess is the card isn't quite up to the job you want it to do.

 

Nev.