Graphics Card Upgrade

My desktop PC is a three-year-old Dell Dimension 8400 with a 128 MB PCI Express x16 ATI Radeon X300 SE graphics card. SL runs okay (and I can run multiple sessions at once ever since I upgraded my system RAM from 1 MB to 3 MB), but I'd like to upgrade the graphics card to something more current so I can really turn up the settings in SL and City of Heroes. I've been browsing newegg.com and I'm a bit bewildered by all the different cards that are out there. So I'm looking for some recommendations on a good card that can be had for $250 or less that won't force me to spend additional money upgrading beyond my stock 350 watt power supply. Do I stick with ATI, or go over to the GEForce 7 or 8 series? And which manufacturers are the best?

most ppl will say nothing will run on a 350 watt power supply, which isnt true it depends on your total machine load but you will be cutting it close

ive been able to get a 6600GT ruining on a 250 watt power supply, the ps ran warmer, and i couldnt have 2 hard drive plugged in ... bout 9 months later it finally burned out

so upgrading power isnt a bad idea, just not totally neccacary

I would not completely rule out upgrading the power supply. Some modern cards require one or two additional power connections. Its also generally recommended that these connections not be shared with other components such as drives. Depending on the system power supply and the number of free connections, you may or may not have to upgrade to use a newer card.

Edit: Back to the original question. In the $250.00 or less price range, I'd suggest the 256MB Nvidia 8800GT cards. For a little more money, the 8800GT can be had with 512MB of video RAM.

The manufacturer has a minimum wattage that has to be met for the card to work. I think the 6600GT required a 300 watt power supply as a minimum. They assume you are using a well made power supply that actually provides 300 watts in the correct way. Ching Chong's Magic Sparkle 5 zillion watt power supply and combination rice cooker may not actually put out 300 watts (imagine that). I know Nvidia even lists power supplies it has tested and are known to work.

wattage is fun, esp since no one wants to actually release real stats, heres what i found, cause i was bored and for some sick reason i enjoy this crap

from what i can tell a bare bones single core slightly older 3 ghz computer is going to consume 150 -200 watts (depending on ram, exact drive setups ect)

im going to take a guess, since i cant find any official dell specs and i dont own this computer, 180 watts, why cause its average to the totally random numbers and it sounds ok to me tru experience ... this is not exact tho just letting you know

using this chart http://www.atomicmpc.com.au/forums.asp?s=2&c=7&t=9354

we can remove 33 watts for the video card ... that gives you roughly 203 watts to play with

again looking on that chart you could have enugh power to run any SINGLE geforce or ATI card you want

you might even have enugh wattage left over for another disk drive but i really wouldn't push it

so lets look at video cards

just a quick glance at tigerdirect.com (us) is selling a 512mb geforce 8800GT (over clocked) for 249.99 after a mail in rebate, they also sell a ati HD 3870 with 512 mb for the same price without a mail in rebate

so im gonna bounce over to toms hardware to see whats better
(http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html)

i dropped both cards in and told it to give me an overall result of all the benchmarks

the over clocked 8800GT scored 2124.4 points
the ati HD3870 scored 1839.9

so in this series of test the over clocked 8800GT was roughly 2.8 % faster but its 270$ until you get the 20$ rebate and that rebate only applies to us citizens ...

if the geforce was not over clocked they probably would perform the same i would lean towards the nvidia card

and at that level pretty much any of the manufacturers should be just fine (lower models evga has awesome support, but crappy heat sinks)


back to the power supply, i cant stress enough this is a best guess, if you do this keep an eye out on the heat coming out of that thing, if you cant tell a difference you should be ok

if its slightly warmer you could be ok or you could be getting a new power supply in a year or so

if its hot replace asap

also it is true you do not want anything else on the same wire as the video card, they all end up in the same place but its to insure your not drawing too much power off of those thin wires