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I would go up to a ATI 5000 series card if I were in your shoes(money no object). Plus the power requirement is actually less on these because of the new GPU arcitecture.
I would go up to a ATI 5000 series card if I were in your shoes(money no object). Plus the power requirement is actually less on these because of the new GPU arcitecture.
now if you can afford it...... you'd be very happy with the performance of a 5870 as it is equal to a 295 and much faster than the 280, but its up to you on what you want
IMO go with the 5000 series. Definitely better horsepower and better visual effects without compensating any performance, unlike nvidia, even the new 'Fermi' series looks like they are not supporting DirectX 11. If you want 280 performance, go with the 5850, more bang for the buck.
How do i check if my pc can handle the card or has enough power?
As with any upgrade power must be given priority, with most pc's built by major companies cost margins are kept low by using the most least expensive parts. Therfore you would be looking in the 300-350 watt range in your power supply. If you overload the power supply you reduce its life and it will overload by adding a hi watt demand grafix card that will destroy your pc. As I counsel all custom builders think power supply and what are your needs agoing to be in the future.
Hope this helps,
Adrian
basically if you have a stock power supply you need to replace it plain and simple the stock power supply that comes with an OEM machine is just barely enough to run the hardware it came with.
honestly I don't even recommend taking any OEM machine and use it for the base for a gaming computer you are better of building from scratch
If you open the tower or desktop case, there should be a label on the side of the power supply which will tell you what wattage the power supply is rated at :)
Check that opening the case doesn't void your warranty first
most OEM's use Bestec power supply's which have a long history of failure
this might sound stupid but is there anyway u can add more power to your cpu? and like i said before is there anyway to really check how much power your cpu has just be on the safe side and make sure, becuase if am only stuck on 300-350 watts, then am basically screwed..