I want to replace my stock graphics card. My question is how do i know that the card i get will be better considering that i cant find my stock card on any hardware sites?

Well, if you post what card you have here and what card you wish to purchase and what you want to do (gaming, 3d modeling, etc) I am sure we could help you. But with the little info you gave us, it is hard to guess...

current card is an ATI Radeon X300 128mb, its the original cheapo that shipped in a Dell Dimension E510.

I want to use the card for CAD and WoW.

Yup, as MegaMan suggested, it really depends what you plan to DO with it.
*Generally speaking* virtually ANY plug-in AGP or PCI-E (and maybe even PCI, I don't know) VGA cards are going to outperform an onboard device such as the x300, Intel x3000 or GMA950/955. That's not to say they suck, but for performance, they just don't compare in most categories (clock speed, pixel pipelines, rendering abilities, shading, openGL support, graphics acceleration, DirectX support (if needed) and particularly in areas such as CPU resource consumption and RAM usage.

Video processing applications will always use the CPU to compute what will be sent TO the video card, but at that point, a faster card with more memory and more features and maybe more plugs on the back, will do more for you.

I use a CHEAP (like $50-60 CAD) nVidia N44 based eGeforce GS7100 with 256 MB onboard, and it totally rocks for what I need it to do. It's no Ferarri, but it cleans the clock of an onboard unit.
Perhaps if I were doing 3D modelling or animation or something, I'd be less delighted, but when one considers the cost of some of the high end cards (like $800.00 and up !?!?!) I think you need to be doing some pretty intense crap to need something like that

http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html

Plenty to choose from. No ATI300 there because it scores lower than the bottom card in the list. The results apply to DirectX performance so they're not always perfectly representative for OpenGL but you do get a rough idea.

GrapefruiTgirl has some very good points. Well bigalexe, assuming that you are going to play WoW and use CAD applications in Linux, there is just one way to go: Nvidia cards. My main machine has a very good ATI card, which is basically unusable in Linux, even using the ATI drivers. While some games ran fine (like Quake 4 and Doom 3), the fps were still low. Under Cedega, almost no games worked with my ATI card. World of Warcraft did not work.

However, When I tested the same machine with an older Nvidia and nvidia drivers, everything was just great (as great as gaming in Linux can be, that is).

Now, if you are going to game in Windows, then any card(either ATI or nvidia) will do, really. I personally like ATI cards more than Nvidia's when gaming in Windows, but would never use on in Linux, unfortunately.

For the actual card, it depends how much you want to spend. A nvidia 7300 Turbo Cache can run World of Warcraft just fine and it is extremely cheap. I would go for a nvidia 7600 at least if I were you. Still a great price and a much better card than 7300. On the top of that, you can find 7600 Silent (without a fan), if you like silent computers (I sure do).

Anything overkill (for World of Warcraft and CAD, that is) like a 8800 is a waste of money, especially if you are going to game Linux-only (because of the amount of games that actually run in Linux, natively or not).

Just my two cents.

proably should've mentioned im running WinXP SP2

Was looking for a 7600 and ran across this deal. Ill probably get this one.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...28#detailspecs

I don't know, but I'd reccomend newegg.

What is your price range? Do you need DX10? Since your using XP, I'm guessing you could go for a geforce 7 series card too.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127297

Same card, $10 cheaper off the bat, and a $10 mail in rebate.

Wait a few days/weeks/month until the 8.42/4 driver by AMD, and buy a X1950XT or something else nice by ATI in the 100$ range, or maybe something a bit lower. ATI has opened its specification on the R500+ cards.

Ok, thx for the tip. I dont usually check Newegg anymore because i found Tigerdirect to be cheaper most of the time at least when i look.

Don't care much about the amount of RAM the card has... go for clock and ram speed. There are cards out there with 1024 RAM which can be put to shame to some 256/128 cards. Think about these two examples:

Card 1: ATI X1600XT 256M GDDR3

Core Clock Speed: 600 MHz
Memory Clock Speed: 1.4 GHz

Card 2: ATI X1600 PRO 512M DDR2

Core Clock Speed: 500 MHz
Memory Clock Speed: 800 MHz

The first card with destroy the second card (with twice the amount of RAM) without contest. Once again, when buying a card, consider Clock speed and Ram speed. Amount of RAM will have little to no impact on the performance (hence why a lot of 512mb cards are cheaper than good 128/256 cards).

One last question. How does one figure out how much power their pc components are using and so they can figure out if they need to upgrade their power supply when making an addition? I very much doubt that im going to touch that threshold when i install the card but i would like to be able to check anyway.

Im using WinXP SP2 just for reference on a Dell Dimension E510 if that helps any.

Power really shouldn't really be a problem. I wouldn't worry about it.

If you have lots of other really powerful components, or if the video card had a PCIe Power connector (which on most new midrange cards, don't have) shouldn't be a problem.

Don't underestimate the power consumption of graphics cards; the more powerful ones are by far the most demanding components in a system. Not, of course, when you are simply browsing or checking your mail. But when you run some recent games, they can consume two to three times as much as a CPU running at 100%.

I suggest that you google for the Outervision PSU calculator. Just bear in mind that their estimates are generally much higher than what is really required, especially if you have a quality PSU.I would say that about 400W should be safe.

http://www.extreme.outervision.com/p...ulatorlite.jsp

Here you go. I think with a 1600 series card from ATI, or a 7300GT/7600GS/7600GT, you wouldn't need to upgrade your PSU. That is, if it's a Core 2 Duo machine. But still, I'd be careful to make sure you have some room to work with, so you don't end up being 1W away from blowing up.