With only 36 amps on two 12 volt rails and 430 to 460 watts what card could I use in my son's much older, original pc that has a socket 775 e5200 and would be better than his current 9800 GT? He games in 1080p when he pc games.
260x is a good place to start. Not too costly, and it is balanced with the rest of the system. Reasonable medium setting 1080p card. For a little more performance, you might consider the R7 265, or alternately, the 750ti. Those cards will handle most games on a mixture of medium-high settings.
It would be advisable to overclock the E5200.
I have overclocked the cpu to 3.0 GHz but it won't go any higher without more voltage and other tweaks. I am looking at getting a 1 GHz improvement from it. I had gotten two other pcs supposedly overclocked stable (24 hour testing) but have been getting blue screens so I kind of put working on that pc on hold. As for the video card recommendation info. thanks.