Hello
My old fx400 card burnt out and i want to buy a 6600 but in the manufacturers website, it says i need "A minimum 300W system power supply and an available hard disk drive power dongle (smaller floppy disk drive connector is not sufficient)"

1) what is meant buy power supply? dont i just pull out the old card and put in the new one?
2)whats a power hard disk dongle?

thanks

1. the power supply is basically a transformer. It's a self-contained box within the computer case. It looks something like this:

http://www.icpamerica.com/images/AC...

It's takes the AC voltage from the wall plug & converts it to DC voltage & breaks it up into various DC voltage "rails". The big 3 are the +3.3v, +5v, & +12v rails. The +12v rail is the most important. Your power supply must be able to provide adequate amperage on the +12v rail to be able to support any higher end video card that requires a "hard disk dongle" connection.

2. the hard disk dongle is a large 4-pin plug that is commonly used to supply power to a hard drive or optical drive. Many newer video cards require one of these plugs to supply added power to the card. It's also known as a 4-pin molex plug. You can see them on the power supply pic above...here's a closer view:

http://www.modding-faq.de/moddingfa...

http://www.hardwarezone.com/img/dat...

thanks a million for that... turns out my computer is too old to handle a new card... but thanks anyway...