ASUS Terminator P4 533 Graphics Card & power supply?

I have an ASUS P4 533 terminator barebones system which has built in Graphics on the sis651 chipset. It has a 2mhz P4 chip %26amp; 512mb memory. I want to add a graphics card to improve performance. There is no AGP slot and only 2 PCI slots. 1 PCI slot is used by the santa cruz sound card. The power supply is only 160 watts so IM worried that adding a power hungry graphics card will cause crashes. Any advise on a low power graphics card which would be suitable?

ASUS Terminator P4 533 Graphics Card %26amp; power supply?

theres two problems that you will encounter ,the first is lack of any graphic interface,in that i mean a.g.p or pci-express slot,and secondly the power supply,even to the most basic graphic card 160watts is not really enough for the average system

so first we will deal with the graphic card problem,lucky for you some manufacturers still make pci graphic cards,and theres some decent cards around

probally the best is the nvidia geforce 6200(http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Qui... is currently the only pci based graphics card that supports both direct x 9.0c and pixel and shader model 3.0,both important factors in todays games,it also has 256mb of video memory and a core clock speed of 300mhz,a very good pci card and probally your best choice

another couple of good cards in pci interface are 1)geforce fx5200(http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Qui... and shader model 2.0 and dx9,and 2)radeon 9250(http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Qui... and shader model 1.1 and dx8

secondly once you have chosen your graphics card,a decent power supply would be the next priority,and again,lucky for you they are quite inexpensive,for example the Dabs Value 480W PSU Gold 12cm SATA PFC (http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Qui... a good power supply(p.s.u) which has enough overall power to run your p.c and all its components,this p.s.u has 6 x 4pin molex ,1 x pci-e 6pin molex,20(4)pin motherboard connector,2 x floppy power connectors

when buying a power supply use a power supply calculator(http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psuca... this one and enter all your components and when you get your total power usage,then add another 100watt on top of that and thats what your minimum p.s.u should be,however this may sound overkill but i recommend you add another 200watt on top of your total and this way you will be sure and it gives you plenty of power for future upgrades and remember you will probally remove the p.s.u from your current p.c when you buy another and need a more powerful p.s.u

another good p.s.u worth looking at is the OCZ Technology StealthXStream 600W Active PFC (http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Qui... this is a bit more expensive but ocz are the bst manufacturers of power supplys and memory and they carry lifetime warranties

alltogether these two upgrades will cost you less than 鎷?00,a good worthwhile improvment to your p.c and you will certainly see the performance improvement

i hope this helps

good luck mate!

ASUS Terminator P4 533 Graphics Card %26amp; power supply?

The above answer is good, with the one exception: Don't buy a generic psu.

In addition to the OCZ he recommends, look at Antec and maybe Hyper. Antec give a 3 year warranty on their psu's, and the new ones are really quiet.

JBV^_^