Hey yall I currently have a NVIDIA GeForce 6150SE nForce 430 in my tower ( just some junky standard hp build ) . I have never had a problem with it, but after upgrading my monitor to a 26 " and maxing out my resolution when playing WoW, i find im getting some uncool lag at times.
I presume a graphics card upgrade would fix this issue, if my power supply can even handle a decent upgrade.
So basically, what can i upgrade to for a card ? How can i tell if my power supply will be able to handle it ?
AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual core 5000+ 2.6 ghz
4 gigs ram

There's 2 things that are needed to help you. The first is what is the make and model of your computer? The second is what how many watts is your power supply? You can find that by opening up the side of the computer and it should be printed on a sticker on the side of the power supply. Unfortunately, with most brand name builds such as hp or dell, they use the lowest wattage power supply they can get away with and to upgrade your video card you also end up upgrading your power supply also. Here's actually a web page that you can use to check to see how many watts a power supply needs to be to run a certain card. I would still suggest that no matter what it comes back with you still add at least another 100 watts to it.

apologies for the late reply. Hp pavilion a6547c.
Power supply - liteon ps-5251-08 250w output

PS : i have an old LC-B450 E L&C 450 w output sitting around also which is about the same size/ perhaps smaller than the 250.

I have not even seriously looked at cards yet as i am unsure of what i can run. money is not a big deal though. really thats what i need to know:: what card can i put in here ?

Not a whole lot of help ......
This site gives me card suggestions but im still not sure i can run them.
Its rather odd to come to a help site and get redirected to another help site.

With the 250W power supply you'll be hard pressed to find anything that will run on your system. With the 450W though there's quite a few. Here's a web page that has most of the newer nvidia geforce cards and their minimum power requirements that you can take a look at.

Thats awsome, ty. This is leading me to a few more questions and then i will be out of your hair. Your patience is appreciated.
The GTX 250 model
Minimum of a 450 Watt power supply.
(Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 24 amps.) One available 6-pin PCI Express power dongles

Is this too much, would a 450 requirement be pushing it ?
Also what is this 6 pin pci express dongle they refer to ? Im looking at my old 450 thinking....this dosnt have one of those .


Would the GT 240 model be a better choice ?
Minimum of a 300 Watt power supply.
(Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 18 Amps.)

In reviews i see people talking about the 9600 being a better card for the money. the 59 watt version requires 300w and no 6 pin connectors seesm to be equal to the 240 spec wise.

Most cards have a 4 pin molex to 6 pin pci-e dongle that come with them so that's not a big deal and if it doesn't you can usually buy one cheap at a nearby electronics store.

As for the 250, usually I recommend having at least 100W over the minimum, especially if you have more than one hard drive, multiple CD/DVD burners or plan on doing any upgrading in the future.

And from a comparison chart I just found, the 9600 does look pretty comparable to the 240, although I didn't see a 59W version, only an 84W. In terms of speed, the 9600 was even just a tad bit faster although probably not enough to notice any differenc. If you'd like to look at the charts I was looking at, you can look at them here. - Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia