Upgrading my gpu

you need a minimum of 500watts with two 6 pin power cables

What kind of processor do you have? It might bottleneck the 7950.

q9300

You'll need to overclock your cpu to keep up with that video card.

I will
but I wanted to make sure my motherboard is good enugh
and yes my psu is 500 wat

Is the 12v rail giving out enough amps to feed the card?

Does your psu have two 6 pin PCI-E plugs? Make sure the card will fit in the case, also make sure if you have an aftermarket cpu cooler that it's not too close to PCI-E bus. Your mobo will probably bottleneck it since it has the older PCI-E x16

I would also be careful you say you will OC your cpu but don't know if your mobo is compatible with that GPU so if you don't know that I would assume you have little to no experience with OC'ing a CPU. Make sure you know what you're doing so you don't brick your machine

Which 500w psu?

A generic 500w psu only put's out about 350w, which will fail immediately upon power up if you try to run that hardware on it.

Why does everyone assume a 500w power supply can't handle the power load when Toms own 7950 review has comments like "Comparatively, the Radeon HD 7950, which averages 315 W of system power use across this test to the 6990’s 450 W and the GTX 590’s 490 W, is downright eco-friendly. "

Keeping in mind that on an 80% efficient power supply, 315 watts from the wall translates to 252 watts needed to be used by the PC.

Though to the OP, you would probably get better performance if you switch up to a Sandy/Ivy bridge processor and MB and drop down to a 7850 to keep your price in line.

Who said a 500w power supply can't handle the load??? Are you following the right thread?

Yes:

"A generic 500w psu only put's out about 350w, which will fail immediately upon power up if you try to run that hardware on it. "

Note the word "generic". Please pay attention next time. Nobody said a 500w psu would not be sufficient, I said a generic 500w psu would not be sufficient, because it doesn't put out anywhere near 500w.

Trust me, it will fail as soon as you hit the power button with that hardware, can you say meltdown?

It's obvious your uneducated about psu's.