PSU not being able to support this?

[Mythik]

A'ight..I have a 3 year old computer (*cough* Dell *cough)...

if anyone knows anything about dells, it's the fact that they do anything in their power to make it so you can not upgrade their stuff...biggest pain in the butt: PSU. They have a special adapter into the mobo and put the power wires on the wrong side.

Alright...that being said...after 3 years, it's still a decent system (P4 2ghz, 512mb ram), but with a bottleneck of a graphics card (64mb GF3).

Now...I can get a 128mb 9800 pro for pretty cheap, and was going to jump the offer, but my 250w PSU is making me rather wary.

I've heard people running a 9600xt fine on the power supply...

so, should I go for it? I want to make this computer last for another year, and do a full upgrade when I go off to college next fall.

[TheMajor]

Depends on what you are doing.

[Mythik]

Gaming, mostly.

[beedubaya]

250W is a little weak for a 9800 Pro. In fact, I wouldn't even run a 9600XT on that. You need at least a 400W PSU if you want to be talking about anything more in the way of graphics cards than the low end crap like the 9200SE and X300SE.