How to Pick a Video Card For Your Computer

Choosing a video card for your computer largely depends on your needs. If you use graphics-intensive applications frequently, then you will most certainly need a high-end PCI express graphics card or an SLI video card. If you will only be playing DVDs movies, then you do not really need to pick a video card for your computer. You can make do with the card that is included in your motherboard. These types of video cards are called integrated video cards.

If you decide to purchase a dedicated graphics card, you have to take a close look at your motherboard interface. Older motherboards can only support one video card and they have to be attached via an AGP slot. Modern motherboards are incompatible with AGP graphics cards. These motherboards now use the PCIe standard or the Peripheral Component Interconnect express standard instead of AGP or Accelerated Graphics Port.

You can only attach PCI express graphics cards to motherboards that support the PCIe standard. Conversely, AGP cards will only work on motherboards that support the AGP standard.

For a top-performing PCI express graphics card, look for one with a fast speed and decent onboard memory. Speed will be expressed in megahertz and onboard memory is expressed megabytes. Onboard memory is similar to your system RAM. The only difference is that is solely used by your graphics card. It is sometimes referred to as video RAM. About 512MB is a nice video RAM to play computer games with.

Pay close attention to your budget when dealing with graphics cards! High-end solutions can be priced at several hundred dollars. The two leading graphics card designers are Nvidia and ATI. You can purchase quality video cards from these companies. They also offer video cards -- the SLI video card and the CrossFire video card -- that can be used together in one computer.

Jeffrey_Frasco

Enter Your Email Address For Update :

Delivered by FeedBurner

May be You Want Read This :