Hi i'm looking at upgrading my old PCI-E ATI X600 graphics card to a nvidia card, my current motherboard is a Intel Pentium 4 3.20 GHz CPU, my memory is 1GB and i'm currently running Windows XP Media Center edition.

What would you recommend that I upgrade my graphics card to, without it going to waste because its too powerful for my motherboard to handle?

I really depends on your budget? I could recommend the £300-400 top end cards but can you afford them?
I personally have a mid-range ATI X1650 card which copes with most games and media functionality.

I'm not really worried about how much a new will cost, i just dont want to buy one and my cpu will die because the graohics card is too powerfull or does having a strong card not really matter in reguards to cpu.
Thanks for your help.
-Neil

Purchasing and installing a new graphics card will not neccessarily cause power issues in and of itself, unless you have a low-powered or weak PS Unit.

What is the Make/Model of your current PS Unit ?!?

Perhaps if you want to get a high-end graphics card you should consider another PS Unit as well

There are a lot of cards to choose from but it comes down to basically what flavor of GPU do you like, ATi or nVidia ?!?

Also, many of the mid-range cards are decent performers, I have an ATi X1600 Pro in my file server machine, an AGP card and in my SLI Gaming Rig I have a pair of Asus 7800GTX, PCIe cards.

I like them both but for different reasons, SLI for gaming performance and ATi I think still has the best DVD output quality

What a lot of BS, haven't you guys ever heard of or used Matrox Graphics cards. There's a lot more around than just ATI or NVidia cards, and I would not use either of them, I'd much prefer a Matrox Parhelia.

Sure have heard of Matrox, back in the day I used the Millenium series of cards for DOS/WIN3.xx and WIN95, they were great cards for many things, including games back then.

As for today's use, I guess it depends on the use you have for said graphics card, if you are gaming I wouldn't recommend the Matrox card, I just don't think it has the GPU horsepower that many games require now a days

Thanks for the help guys, judging by my system i think i need to do a couple of upgrades. This has been much appreciated.

You're welcome