Help with upgrading video card in gaming rig?

I have recently purchased a CyberPowerPC with an Athlon AMD II X4 630 Processor, 4GB of ram, and a Geforce G210 graphics card. I am wanting to play more games on my pc so I'll be needing to upgrade the graphics card in it at some point soon. I was looking at a lot of the cards available (I haven't been keeping up with graphics cards lately), and I'm not sure how powerful of a graphics card I would need with the processor being a quad core - I don't know if it would even make a difference. according to a lot of my research and tests, my computer will play most new games fine already, which confuses me because my graphics card is only a nvidia g210.



I got a cheap lcd widescreen monitor for now - it's only VGA compatible apparently. Most of the newer graphics cards don't seem to support vga, so I don't know if it would be better to get a whole new monitor that supports dvi or use vga to dvi cables? I don't have to have everything looking super high quality, just as long as things are standard definition is fine with me. I wouldn't mind being able to play some games on high detail, though.



Basically, I'm just not sure which direction to go in with upgrading the video card. My power supply is a 450 watt. I've had power supply problems in the past with upgrading video cards - but that was back in 2006 on a much crappier computer.



I'm thinking about the ati radeon hd 5770, or maybe a nvidia equivalent.



Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks. :) Sorry if some of this is a "no-brainer".



Games I would like to play - Starcraft II (will run on my computer now I believe), Batman Arkham City (when it comes out) Resident Evil 5, and maybe decently run any newer game that becomes available in the near future for at least the next few years. (2 years seems to be the life cycle with pc game specs anyways).



I'm playing World Of Warcraft and The Sims 3 on it now with no problems.|||First of all, WoW and Sim 3 they had very little requirement in that almost every PC out there (even the on board graphic) can managed. Just don't put it to high settings. This is why your G210 seem to be couping with 3D graphic games so far.



I haven't tried StarCraft 2 yet, so I'm not too sure about the requirements, but I suspect GT210 will failed badly on high quality, you might have to drop it down to Low for a smoother playable flame rate. Resident Evil 5 is also very graphic card dependent, so the GT210 will failed again.



The VGA and DVI should not be part of your concern, because all graphic card sold today still have some sort of adaptor which allows itself connect back to the old VGA. Therefore, for very litle reason or almost no reason as to why you should buy a new monitor just because of the VGA and DVI.



New graphic card:

5770 is fine, miles better then GT210. The equvalent of that will be something like GTX260.



Power supply: it will depends on what make, what model and at what price you bought the power supply originally. Cheaper ones are often fake in its power rating. Same apply to most power supplies come in pre-build machines. If you don't trust your existing power supply, I highly recommend the ones from Corsair where not a single one failed to deliver its stated ouput as tested by independent ppl.|||u can play every game on ati 5770 on max for this system and for this 3D card u

buy at least 500W power supply.For more information see this

http://www.techspot.com/review/209-ati-r…

i hope this will help u|||I have a Radeon HD 4770 512mb and it runs all my games perfectly fine. It overclocks to 900/1000 and uses very little power. A GTS 250 or a HD 4850 will also play all those games very well. However, if you need DirectX 11 support, then the 5770 is a great choice. It will play all games very well, even in the near future.



The only problem I can see is that some of the games you listed favor Nvidia cards, specifically Resident Evil 5 and possibly Batman. With Nvidia, Resident Evil 5 will show an increase of 5% - 10 % performance over a comparable ATI card. That's not to say that an ATI can't play it. My 4770 gets 45 FPS at 1368x768 everything max 4xaa. The 5770 should have no trouble at all.



However, if Batman Arkham City uses PhysX just like Arkham Asylum did, then you would do well buying an Nvidia solution such as the GTX 460.



If PhysX isn't important to you, then the Radeon will be fine. Personally, I decided that PhysX wasn't that important, even though it would allow me to play get good frame rates in Mirror's Edge and Batman AA.