To be on the safe side, since I don't know whether it really is practical to
upgrade the power supply on this system, I would suggest looking at video
cards that don't require that much power.  Somewhat arbitrarily, I'm going
to rule out video cards that require an external power connector for this
reason.  The ATI Radeon 9600XT 128mb is probably your best game card in this
"low power" catagory.

For examples, from NewEgg, http://tinyurl.com/aao79 .

It offers hardware support for both DirectX 8 and some DirectX 9 features,
which is in contrast to both your current Geforce2 and the Geforce4 MX
series cards.  This should be a significant step up from your current 32mb
Geforce2, and I think that if you are looking for more game playing power
from your computer than this can offer, you probably would do better
building a new computer with this goal in mind, instead of trying to upgrade
your current system.

Although I'm not sure that this is the way to go, if you search NewEgg for
micro-ATX power supplies, you'll see that they do offer some with higher
wattage ratings than 220W, http://tinyurl.com/8rfse .  But, you'll still
need to double check the dimensions of one of these with what you have now
to make sure it will fit.  The dimensions of these micro-ATX power supplies
are not very standardized.  You can see that some have fans mounted to the
outside while others have them inside, which will affect their fit.  (You
can probably expect that a high wattage model with a small internal fan will
get quite noisey under load.)  There's even a chance that you could shoehorn
in a standard sized power supply, but I'm doubtful of that, especially when
you take in to account the need for some room to run the wires from the
power supply.  Although NewEgg may not have the external dimensions for all
of the power supplies that they sell, you can usually find this information
on the manufacturers' websites.

Just my 2 cents.

John Sproule

----- Original Message -----
From: "Julie" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, July 21, 2005 3:51 AM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Video card/power supply questions


> Ugh, I had that problem with the case being too small for a replacement
> power supply with my first computer years ago but that one was an ancient
> (1993) and tiny Packard Bell so I'd hoped I'd avoided the problem this
> time
> around. I did notice that the power supplies I was pricing at newegg.com
> did
> look sort of big. My case is L:16.55 W: 6.88" H:14.5 (in inches)
>
> I'm hoping  to be able to play some games a little more smoothly,like
> Sims2
> and the upcoming Black and white2. It runs ok on my machine now but the
> video memory is too low and is taken from system memory on top of it.

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