Will my motherboard/computer be able to handle nvidia gtx 260

Will someone please help me? Can my computer handle an nvidia gtx 260? Some of my questions are like can it fit in my case, my power supply handle the temp, my motherboard being able to fit it also? Or any other suggestion of a card that will fit my rig......prefering an nvidia?

HP Pavilion a6230n

Motherboard
Manufacturer: Asus
Motherboard Name: M2N68-LA

CPU
Athlon 64 X2 (W) 5600+ 2.8 GHz (89W)
2000 MT/s (mega transfers/second)

RAM
3 GB (667 mhz) 240 pin, DDR2 SDRAM

Current Video Card
XFX GeForce 8600 GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16

Power Supply
APEVIA ATX-CW500WP4 500W ATX

Windows Vista 32-bit OS
HP w1907 19 in LCD monitor
Max resolution (1440x900)

The GTX260 is a bit over 10 1/2 inches long (270mm) You'll have to measure your case yourself to see if it will fit and not cover SATA sockets or clear your hard drive. I am a little concerned about your power supply since Apevia has a pretty bad reputation. A number of cards would be a big upgrade for your system. Here's a handy hierarchy chart to show their relative power.
http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 987-6.html
As you can see the HD4850 is one tier below the GTX260 and running about $150-$170 after rebate.
Your motherboard has a PCIex16 socket and it will work with any PCIex16 1.0 or 2.0 graphic card

Depending on the game title, the GTX 260 and 4870 will trade off wins. Overall, the GTX 260 is only slightly faster with AA with a couple FPS slower overall than 4870 without any AA. All resolutions up to 25x16. Tom's Hardware did a review a while back on it, they tested a load of games. The performance difference are in the single digits and not 15% as outlw666 says. It all depends on the games you'll be playing, pick the card that performs better. For example.. GRID plays faster on ATI 4870 cards while CoH runs faster on Nvidia GTX 260 cards. Overall, their performance is identical except for the few games where performance is significantly different.

Actually, it performs up to 27.7% faster in Bioshock @ 1680x1050 according to Anandtech's review.
118.9 FPS for the 4870 and 93.1 FPS for the GTX 280.
(118.9*100)/93.1 = 127.71 or 27.7% higher performance.
The performance gap closes as the resolution raises but the 4870 still maintains a healthy lead in most benchmarks.




BTW, the 4K series fixed the lackluster AA performance of the 3K series.
There is now only minimal performance drop up to 8x AA at which point it outperforms the GTX 280 in nearly all games.