No single card will max out crysis, anyway.

A 9600 or an 8800 will be able to run crysis okay, and something like an 9800 or two 8800s in SLI will be able to run it well. Only e.g two 9800s in SLI will be able to nearly max it out.

but how about the 9400? how will it do ?

The 9400 is one of the lowest specced cards in the range. It ranks just under an 8600 which is jut about enough to run crysis on low/very low. Im surrprised if it will run it at all.

how about nba 2k9 will i be able to run it?

yeah it will run, that game doent need a very powerful card

I'm having a bear of a time installing that card in my PCI slot. If i've read everything correctly, i need to uninstall everything existing, video drivers, video adapters, and all the related items and so on...and then install all the software. is that correct? keeping in mind i have an integrated video card and the computer will use that unless it detects something in the pci slot. do i need to uninstall the intel video controllers also? i'm really hoping that i did it wrong before and it isn't as slow as it tested out to be. any help or advice would be most appreciated. thanks. ps i've had no luck running fallout 3 and someother much less demanding games like civilization 4.

Generally all you have to do is plug it in then grab the most recent nvidia drivers from the nvidia website and it "just works"

Im guessing youve probably broken the drivers somehow considering that civilization 4 runs on max on an old 7500. Remove nvidia software. REBOOT. Reinstall nvidia software using newest version from thier site. Reboot. Leave pc for a while to detect new hardware. Then go into ad new hardware and let it scan. If anything has an error, point it to the drivers.

Fallout 3 is pretty demanding. Runs on medium/low on an 8600 (for reference, a 9500 is just a tad better than this)

thanks a lot for the help. i'll do all that and cross my fingers. two follow up questions? in doing research i've heard the following may help and are they true? any of them independently that is : 1) disable hyperthreading in bios 2) turning off the graphics accelerator in windows. on a separate note is the video controller in my system something that the graphics card takes over? should i disable it, uninstall it or just leave it be and keep the drivers in it up to date?

The integrated graphics should automatically disable. On my motherboard, they are disabled if it detects ay card in the PCI express slot.

Dont do that, if anything, that would drastically worsen performance.