New Graphics Card Question

Hello all you beautiful techy people!

I have a Dell E510, I know it has 1 PCIe slot.

My graphics card just died on me and I had to go back to the original card (a Raedon 600!! UGH!) I can barely play sl now.

I want to buy a new video card but last year I bought a GeForce 8800 and it was so big there was no way to fit it inside my computer.

Before I go through all the trouble of buying a new card only to have to return it I was hoping one of you might be able to help me.

I have a budget of $250 and want as good a card as I can get for the money.
Any and all help welcome! Thanks so much,
Handy

9500GT is a standard size card (ok really they are all standard sizes but you get my drift) and is fairly decent

You can get the fastest (or nearly so with things that are overclocked or double gpu) video cards for $229 at Tigerdirect, the Nvidia GTX 280 1 gb made by EVGA. Unfortunately it is slightly bigger than the 8800GTX. All high end cards are huge now days and the relatively low end of the GTX 200 series, the GTX 250 is still a large card. The 9500GT is a much smaller card and is only $54 or so but it should fit in your case yet still run SL decently.

I am also shopping for a new card, and I have heard that in SL the 8800 performs very well. I have heard conflicting reports about the 9600, some say fantastic and others say that the 9000 series is not as stable as the 8000 series.

The latest product is the GTX series, I think. Someone else can chime in on that.

Here is a link to the nVidia GeForce site that has specs for each card.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_family.html

This page will give you a chart to compare the 8000 series cards.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_family.html

Note on the 8-9000 series, the first number is the series, the second number has to do with how powerful the card is. So for example if you go from a 8800 to a 9500 that would actually be a lower level card even though it is more recent.

ETA: sorry, didn't see that you had already tried an 8800. As to fitting inside your box, only you will be able to determine that.

I'm still running on an old 7300 card and it runs SL just fine but I can really only use Ultra for taking screenshots as it gets too laggy.

Another thing to note, the higher end cards will have higher power requirements as well, so a new power supply may be needed and will have a noisier fan inside.

There really isn't a spit's worth of difference between the 8800GTX and the GTX 280 performance-wise with SL. Both run SL at max eye candy with smooth frame rates. If you can find a used 8800GTX for around a $100 I'd snatch it up in a heartbeat because it is perfect for SL, I've been using mine for 3 years and it does everything well and is overkill for SL as it is, my new GTX 280 is an awesome card, no doubt, but probably not really worth the upgrade if just for SL.

My advice, for $250 I'd grab a used 8800 GTX (the "X" is important) off of Ebay and a new case with a 500watt or better power supply big enough to hold the card.