Which Video Card To Upgrade To

Hey i want to upgrade the video card that came with my dell desktop. Can anyone recommend the best cards so that SL will run the best for me? I appreciate it.

depends on your desktop

for starters what expansion slots do you have? pci agp pci-express?

http://www.naplestech.com/shopcart/bus_speeds.asp

or how about a model number, dell has made thousands of different computers in their time

I've got a dell vostro with Intel Core 2 Duo CPU e6550 @ 2.33 GHZ... 1013 Ram

well if its the tower dell offers a geforce 8600 which is a good card, it does not say too much about your power supply which would be the biggest worry in my mind

but if dell is offering a 8600 then it should be safe to use, altho i would not order it from dell without shopping around first

ie you might find one with more ram or a GT (faster) model for about the same price as dell

The 8600GT needs a 400 watt power supply. It will run on less (I know because I had a 320 watt ps with that card before I got my new 650 watt a few months ago), but I would not recommend doing that.

I was looking at the 8600 at a computer store, and the clerk recommended the e-VGA GeForce 9600GT... Should i spend the extra bucks on the 9600, will there be a performance difference beteween the two? And yea, i was told i need to upgrade my powersupply as well.. Thanks for all the help BTW

If you're doing a lot of SL, going to 2GB of RAM might be a better choice as a first step...

i would, being the next newest model its bound to have a couple bells and whistles that help it out, and raw performance wise its nearly the speed of a 8800GT, but alot less cost

http://www.3-pg.com/content/view/308/1/

Nvidia slowly burnssss...

I'm glad the 8600 I have didn't come with stock cooling.

99.99999999% of the time you get your new balls to the wall, micro heater with nothing more than a piece of sheet metal glued to it for a heatsink

better yet you get one of those boxed in heatsinks, which have jack crap over the cpu but a little fan and a 1/8th inch of sheet metal, all the cooling fins are off to the side, where they promptly clog with dust

this is not just a nvidia problem tho, all makes and models of cards do this now ... sad really my geforce 1 had a celeron cooler bolted onto it

my geforce 2 had a pentium pro sized cast aluminum

my geforce 7600 has a peice of crap sheet metal on it, my old 6600GT had a boxed in heatsink, which clogged up with dust and burned up

my new 6600GT-OC from bfg had a little more respectable heatsink on it, not much more than a plate with some foil fins on it

all in all, MOST people do not have a issue with these things, they usually work just fine, but im not most people and i replace my stock cooling with a good after market device

its wether you want to trust something like this (which is actually 2 steps up from what came on the 7600gs)

http://media.uxcell.com/uxcell/images/item/catalog/ux_a07012900ux0018_ux_c.jpg

or something like this (which is totally overkill for most cards, mines not even this big, but it is copper!)

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3424768&CatId=498

on your 200$ heater

(side note if you do use an aftermarket cooler keep the stock one around, just incase you have to send the card back on warranty, most manufacturers get bitchy when you send them a video card with no fan on it)