Hi, I am thinking of upgrading my gpu from a 8800 gt to a gtx 260. But Im not sure if my power supply is sufficient for it. It has dual 12v rails with 18 amps on each.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817371004 ----thats the current psu in my pc


Requirements
Minimum of a 400 Watt power supply.
(Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 26 Amp Amps.)

and that is the min. required power supply for the 8800 gt which im running just fine




Requirements
Minimum of a 500 Watt power supply.
(Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 36 Amp Amps.)

and that is the min. required power supply for the 260 gtx


I dont really understand how dual 12v works =/ thanks in advance

The amps their talking about are the total 12 amps of the PSU. You PSU has 18 on 2 rails but that doesn't mean it has 36 amps. I looked on their site and it doesn't say what the total amps are but it's probably around 25-30. Take for instance mine has 4 18a rails and a total of 60a. Your PSU should work for that card but it won't leave you with any headroom so I think it would be in your best interest to get something a little more powerful.

It really depends on what the rest of your system is, if you have a dual core, hard drive, optical and not much else then you'll have plenty of headroom but if you have a quad extreme, several hard drives and a bunch of other things drawing power then you'll need something a little more powerful. The video card companies really are thinking worst case scenario when they come up with these requirements.

Hmm, well I have an athlon x2 4000, 2gig ram, dvd rw drive, and one 250 gig hdd. The only other things im powering that ive added is the 8800 gt and a wireless pci adapter. Not really high end at all

That PSU will be powerful enough although I think the CPU might bottleneck the video card.

Sweet! But yea, i was thinking the same thing as well. But I just recently found out I could use this step up program that evga has and I could trade in my 8800gt + cash for another card, and the gtx 260 seemed sexy got 40 days left on that offer lol

I've used the Step Up before just remember that the price of the card you will be paying is the price on Evga's site and you have to pay shipping both ways which adds another $20-$25 to the cost. So that would be $399 (for the base model) + $25 - the cost of your 8800GT where as you could sell your 8800GT and get this for $329.99 after MIR + $9.39 S/H. And that's just the first place I looked I'm sure if you looked around you might be able to fine a better deal. Step Up isn't a bad thing but just look around before you do it and do the math and see if you can find a better deal. I just sold one of my 8800GT's on Craigs List for $120 and it took less than a day. If you sell your card and buy a new one or do the Step Up either way you will be without a card for a while but if you choose not to do the Step Up you'll be without a card for less time.

Oh forgot to factor in shipping charges lol. Ive still got 40 days left on that step up thing, so i guess i'll browse around for cheaper deals till it starts getting close to the expiration. I was hopin that maybe the 260 gtx might go down in price a little bit in that time, but it just came out so who nows

Just keep in mind that their prices don't come down much, a 8800 Ultra is still $679.99 on their site and a 8800GT is $229.99 where as you could buy one now for ~$100.

Perhaps you could look at stepping up to a 9800GTX, 9800GTX+ or 8800GTS?

Look at 4850 or 4870. GTX 260 and GTX 280 are weak for their price points. 4850 CF will slap the sense out of GTX 260. A single 4870 will be better than a GTX 260. And it'll be $100 less.

Hmm not really familiar with the 9800gtx+, is that goin to be released soon? Wasn't really interested in a 9800gtx cause it didn't like seem much of an upgrade.

And about those radeon cards, Im more of a nividia fan but thanks for the suggestion

The ATI cards are a much better choice, Nvidia cards have a much worse price/performance ratio than ATI but it's your money. The 9800GTX+ is a update of the current 9800GTX and should run slightly faster and cooler but the 4850 is faster and will be ~$40 cheaper when the Nvidia card launches. In most benchmarks the 4850 performs slightly behind the GTX260 and is half the price and the 4870 performs slightly behind the GTX280 and is about $200 cheaper.

Oh wow didn't realize that. Another thing with me about the radeon cards though is that this game im playing called Age of Conan doesn't seem to be optimized well at all for radeon cards, alot of people have been having problems with them =/ and thats also been a reason of me shying away from radeon

It's a newer game and the 4850 and 4870 have just recently been released so with a driver update or two the issues with them should be worked out. As for the other ATI cards they just aren't powerful enough (with the exception of the HD3870x2). Also Nvidia does some questionable business practices by encouraging companies (financially or otherwise) to optimize their software for it's hardware which is why most people are against them. The new 3DMark Vantage is Nvidia optimized to make it stand out against ATI products and make it look better than it really is.