CrazyQs :
Hello,
So suddenly my fan on my video card sounds ridiculous, once it starts spinning it makes a very very loud sound.
So my PC is coming up on 2 years and I just have a Geforce 240 so I was planning on upgrading. However I can not see a sticker on my power supply and have no way of knowing what the watts or voltage are. What video card should I get that would probably work if I had the 240?
You might first power down the PC and open up the case to see if something is caught up in the fan like a dust bunny, a loose screw, or some change, keys, or other crap some infant thought would be cool to push into the vents of your precious baby. Also look for a cable that may have migrated to a bad place (I had this happen today on a rebuild and my wife was howling about me wasting money on fixing pc's that had older parts but were other wise okay - hey, I swapped a MSI 250Gts (I'd replaced with an EVGA 560ti in my main pc) for an old ATI 9800 Pro that was in one of our satellite units - so it was a justified upgrade).
If your PSU is on a manufactured pc (HP, Dell, ACER, Lenovo, Gateway, etc.) verses one you or someone else built, either find your original manual, or just go to the manufacturers website and pull up the specs - you may need to download the PDF of the pc's manual to find the info.
If your PSU is an self / custom-installed one it almost has to have a sticker somewhere on the PSU - maybe it's inside the pc case. I'd venture to guess (without knowing the rest of your pc) that with a Nvidia 240 card you are probably looking at 350 - 450 watts.
If you are a Nvidia guy, I'd say you'd be fine with anything you can find like a Geforce 430, 440, 520 or maybe as high as a 450 or 550ti depending on what wattage you have (and who made the PSU). I wouldn't go back to a 200 series as you will pay as much or more for something that actually uses more power to accomplish as much or less than the higher units AND the newer Gpu's can handle DirectX 11 and Blue-ray DVD outputs.
One thing to consider is maybe upgrading the PSU so you can upgrade your video to some thing better - even manufactured units in regular sized cases aren't that hard to re-power. Last week I pulled the 350w PSU in a Hp m8530f and installed a Coolermaster M600 so I could install a Blue-ray dvd. It has an ASUS 430 (the max I could put with the 350W unit). THAT will have to go ... eventually.
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