Is it worth upgrading videocard from 8500gt to 8800gt or pny gts 250?

hi all.

Would it be worth it for me to upgrade my videocard from the nvidia 8500gt 512megs ram, to a 8800gt [hard to find now] or a nvidia gts 250 with 1024 megs ram!

the 8500gt gives to me about 11 fps, in the starting island, works ok, but i would like very good graphics as i have cable internet. 4megs speed.

I would have to also buy a good power supply.
would the money spent be worth it, as i have to buy both items.

the vista emachine that I have now, the "windows experience" gives to me a 4.4 for the processor, the weakest link in my system. the 8500gt is about a 5.
I have 4 gigs of ram also.

yes that emachine motherboard would be the slowest thing, thus I wonder if
such upgrade and expense would be worth it. I watch a lot of "youtube or vimeo movies too, amazing what HD can do to a movie!
Also i look forwards to watching machima and other users videos and using the voice chat too. As well as streaming music.

yes, this second life intriges me, I look forwards to getting into it.
I probably will be the only senior resdident at my senior home for independant living, to play second life, me at 68 years old.
not to see the "clubs" so much as exploring the worlds.

so should I bit the $$$ bullet??

also i read that the sl program has yet to "recognize" the 250/260/275 series of cards as maybe these cards are so new, so defaults to entry level card, at first. As i read it now, the 8800gt is the leader of the pack! but no longer made as the 250 is a "rebranded" 8800gt but with some small improvements.

thanks....freestone

the gts 250 is a rebranded 9800GT(x?) its smaller and uses abit less juice wich is a good jump away from anything in the 8x series

I got one for the wife for 104 bucks on tigerdirect.com, altho she doesnt play on SL its a good card, with furmark her 8600GT was only doing about 20fps and with the GTS250 it hammers it at 60+ fps no prob

Is it worth YOU upgrading ? i dunno ... whats your cpu and the speed of your ram (ie ive got 2 gigs but its only 400mhz)

If you want to go that route I think it would be best to look at the 9800 GT instead of the 8800. First, it's cheaper and second it runs quite a bit cooler than the 8800........and that is important. All else considered, the cards are carbon copies of each other. One draw back is that the card is physically large. You will need to sacrafice a PCI slot below the PCI e slot the card inhabits.....the width of the card encroaches into that ara making it impossible to put anything in the slot below it. It's also about an 1 to 1 1/2 inches longer in length.......but it's mostly possible to move cables around, perhaps moving an optical drive up or down one bay to accommodate that. Take a look at your 8500 in your case and visualize a card an 1 1/2 inches longer and about 75% wider.......see if you think it will fit. You should be about to get a 9800 card for a little more than $100 USD.....with shopping you might even beat that by a fair amount.

On the power supply. It never hurts to have a ps that is larger than needed. It does hurt to have one too small though. If you plan to stick with full or mid tower desktops, power supplies are one the components that you can easily put in your new computer when you buy one. Just look forward a bit..........if you think you need 450 watts (what that 8600 requires) then look at a 650 to 800 watt ps. They are one of the cheapest components in a computer...........and one fo the most important too.

But, you sort of said you were running an Emachine. That is a low end computer. Your 4.4 score for CPU in Windows Esperience is telling me that you will never get what I think you are expecting with a new card and ps........your working with a slow processor and the graphics won't be much, if any, better no matter what card you put in it. And that 4 gigs of RAM is probably pretty slow too. To get what you want, you need a better computer. I'm afraid.

But, getting a good card and power supply now and using it in that computer could be a "investment" of sorts. Both devices can easily be transferred in a newer computer later. You should be able to get both the card and power supply for about $200 now........that could save you quite a bit more when you purchase a new computer. You can opt for the cheapest video and not worry about the power supply. Just look for a good and fast CPU and fast RAM.....you the rest is waiting to put in it when you get it home.

The GTS250 is a rebranded 9800GTX+. They're both a step up from the 8800GT/9800GT. At $104, this is probably where the sweet spot in performance/price is. It's about the same price as the 9800GT, noticably faster and significantly less expensive than the next step up (GTX260).

If the SL viewer doesn't recognize a card, it gives you a message to that effect, and sets your graphics to Low by default. You can change that in graphics settings to whatever you like, and it'll run fine.

Any of these are a big jump from an 8500GT.