Video Card Upgrade Dimension 4700

[mikefromaa]

I just bought a dell 4700 on ebay for $170. It is shippin with Vista home premium(I know XP is better for gaminI jg, but beggars cant be choosers). I also bought two sticks of ram (CT448359 2GB kit (1GBx2), 240-pin DIMM Upgrade for a Dell Dimension 4700 Series System) that I'm about to pop in. There is a NEC DVD burner and a 160gb 7200rpm sata hard drive consuming power as well. The 4700 is running a 3ghz pentium 4 with the stock motherboard and power supply.

Can I jut pop in a geforce 8600 GT or GTS? Or will I need to upgrade the power supply?

If I wanted to upgrade to a geforce 8800 GT or GTS would this power supply from newegg work?

Antec earthwatts EA430 430W ATX12V v2.0 Power Supply 100 - 240 V UL, CUL, FCC, TUV, CE, CB, C-tick, CCC - Retail

Or would I have to pony up the cash for this one from new egg?

Antec earthwatts EA500 500W ATX12V v2.0 Power Supply 100 - 240 V UL, CUL, FCC, TUV, CE, CB, C-tick, CCC - Retail

Is it hard to upgrade a power supply? My hardware experience is limited to installing graphics cards and RAM sticks. Am I going to brick my new toy?

Is that 3Ghz pentium 4 going to bottleneck the 8800 down to 8600 standards anyway? Those 8600's are going dirt cheap(around $50), if there's not going to be a sizable difference I may just go with that. Looks like the 8800 Gt is going for around $150.

Also...cooling? Any suggestions? I hear the 4700's heat up pretty quick.

 

[Rage_3K_Moiz]

The PSU will be able to handle an 8600GT\GTS easily (I'm assuming it's the 305W PSU the PC came with, with the two 18A +12V rails?). As for the 8800 cards, yes the EA430 will work perfectly fine.

But you would see a noticeable bottleneck with your current processor with an 8800 series card. This will be especially noticeable on games that involve heavy AI crunching, such as most RTS and RPG games. This also includes most recent games from other genres as well, including that system-slayer called Crysis.