I recently got a new radeon 9600 pro 256mb video card, my specs are shown in my signature below. When i start up my computer with it it all works fine nothing is different. Then when i start up a game everything is fine in the menus, but when i start up a game within a minute of playtime my computer just shutsdown very fast and my screen turns black and i cant do anything at all, i was told it may be my power supply and i was just wondering how many watts/volts of a power supply is good enough for this video card? thanks

Usually a power supply will not shut you down. Failure shuts down the power supply.
Possibly your memory. Either you do not have enough, or you have settings and timings and latency issues.
Also, cpu fan, or other cooling issues... dirt and hair in the fan blades or heat sink... old or inadequate thermal paste on the cpu.
About 15 percent of video cards are defective, so suspect the card as much as any other component. It is no better just because it is new.
Also double check your drivers to assure they have not been updated on the website from what you received on disc.

hmm. well just about everything in this computer is new besides the sound card and ethernet card, i have 1 gig of ram. i also got a new fan that works well on my processor. im also not sure of it, but the video card im using now which is a nvidia fx5200 256mb video card is just as good as my old fx5200 128mb. it does not run games very fast, but as soon as i tried that radeon 9600 pro the game ran very fast, and all my game settings were on very high but it just shuts down. my settings with my current video card are all on low and it still runs pretty slow. is it just a bad video card? thanks

Doubt that it is a bad video card, but you have narrowed down the problem... so that it has to be video card, memory, power or cooling. (or, of course, and infestation.

It appears to me that your biggest change is in power demands... so look again at your power supply brand, model, and output on the 12V and 5V lines.