Good graphics card

[MrDiabl0]

I have an Inspiron 560 with a Pentium Dual-Core E5800 3.2GHz cpu and was wondering if anyone knew of a cheap/good graphics card i could get that would work with my current computer.

 

[tj_extreme]

Are you planning on gaming, or just surfing the web/email, etc...?

 

[PP Mguire]

Depends on usage and PSU.

 

[MrDiabl0]

I plan on gaming, specifically Arma 2 atm but other games when i get them

I was looking at the Nvidia Geforce 7800 gt but i dont really know how well that will work :/

 

[PP Mguire]

The 7800gt is quite old and not that powerful these days at all. What is the wattage spec of your PSU and then most importantly your budget.

 

[MrDiabl0]

Lol... 300W and budget wise i would like to keep as low as possible

 

[PP Mguire]

Ouch. Anything that low is really going to be terrible in performance.

Highest would be GT440

Best card in that range is this one.
Newegg.com - ECS NGT440-512QI-F1 GeForce GT 440 (Fermi) 512MB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card

And quite possibly the best card you can get for a 300w PSU.

 

[MrDiabl0]

Ok thank you very much. Just one question, I was wondering how you tell if a video card is good and how do you know what wattage you need for one?

 

[PP Mguire]

Google search the card in question. If you want to know the wattage you just google say "gt 440" and the top link will be Nvidia. Under the specifications tab it will have the wattage needed to run the card. If you type "gt 440 review" it will bring up sites that have reviewed the card in question and show relative performance to other cards.

 

[MrDiabl0]

Sorry just one more question If my current PC only uses 170 watts (about) could i get a GeForce GTS 450 that says it uses max 106 watts and not destroy my psu?[FONT=Trebuchet MS, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]s[/FONT]​