I would like to upgrade the graphics card in my Dell Vostro 200 Slim Desktop.  My hope is to smooth the graphics rendering of RailSimulator.com's Train Simulator 2013 game.

If possible, I would like to keep the current power supply and mother board.

My current setup is as follows.

Windows 7 Home Premium - 64 Bit,  SP1

4 Gig Ram  DDR2 SDRAM 6677MHz

ATI Radeon 2400 Pro with 256MB on the board in a PCIe x16  1.0A slot

250W power supply (OEM)

INTEL CORE 2 duo Proc.  E4500  (2.2 GHz, 2MB, l2 Cache, 800FSB)

Appreciate your suggestions/solutions.

Thanks,

PINESLAKE

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If you want to keep your current motherboard and PSU, then you won't have any options from the official AMD specs. These all require 300W PSU minimum, and that's for the most entry-level cards. A 250W PSU won't be able to run any discrete card with any degree of reliability.

TrainSim 2013 requires a 6450 minimum (625MHz, 512MB VRAM) which requires a 400W PSU, and they recommend a 3870 (775MHz, 1GB VRAM, recommended to use a 500W PSU since it uses over 100W itself). Based on those specs, you'll need a new PSU before you can consider a replacement card, since there aren't any AMD graphics cards that can run on a 250W PSU that can run TrainSim 2013.

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With that motherboard only being PCIe 1.0 it can have problems with newer cards though, so I would only recommend a 3870, 4770, 4850, or 4870. However all of those cards are legacy, and as Kent said require a new PSU. Your CPU is also slow at 2.2ghz, and does not meet the minimum specs for the game either (minimum is a Core 2 Duo E7400 2.80GHz or Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5800+, recommended is a Core 2 Duo E8600 3.33GHz or Athlon II X3 440).


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