Advice on buying a Graphic Card!!!
May 09 '00
Let me start this off buy saying that I am an avid gamer and love to play PC games. I build my own computers, and upgrade whenever I feel the need. Building your own gives you this flexibility. So I will attempt to give you the best advice that I possibly can on buying a video card to suit your needs.
If you are at the point that you want to upgrade your video card, just like anything else the first question you need to ask yourself is: What are you primarily going to do with your computer when it comes to graphics. Are you gonna play high intensity games in high resolutions, are you simply gonna surf the Internet, or are you going to use the card to simply run Windows and a few pre packaged card games.
If you only plan on running Windows and a few minor games than you do not need a huge and powerful graphics card. In this case you should have at least 4mb of ram on the card and it will also be less costly of the three categories that I am trying to cover here. You can find a graphics card of this nature for anywhere between 20 and 40 dollars.
If you plan on using the video to surf the Internet, play a few games , and run Windows then you still don't really need an overly heavy duty graphics card. I would suggest that you get roughly an 8mb card that can run you any where from 20 to 40 dollars as well as the one above.
If your plan involves playing the most recent and up to date PC games on the market, with their high end effects, cinematic movie sequences, and 3D architecture, then you need a high end after market video card. The card should have 16mb of video ram or more(as some of the newer cards are capable of 32+). My recommendation would be a Voodoo3 or Geforce based card. These 16mb cards can range anywhere from 49 dollars to 249 dollars. The Voodoo 3 retail version runs about 120 dollars in the local stores.
So when it comes down to the wire for a standard PC user who is not going to use the video card to run allot of games, should buy themselves a 8mb video card as the prices between that and a 4mb do not vary enough to go with the 4bm as opposed to the 8mb card. Another word of advice is that if you have a mother board that uses the onboard ram to feed the graphics card, thus taking away from system ram. You may want to upgrade to a after market card and disable the built in one, just to claim the system ram back.
Another issue is the choice between PCI and AGP type graphics cards. The PCI interface is considerably slower than the AGP, Thus producing lower frames per second than that of the AGP. So if your mother board has an AGP slot than you should definitely take advantage of the AGP feature. AGP comes in both AGP 2X and more recently AGP 4X. As you may have suspected the AGP 4X is obviously faster than the 2X, yielding you better performance than that of 2X.
The last thing to consider when buying a video card, is that a increase in the quality and ram on your video card can produce a slight increase in how your PC performs. A upgrade to a high end video card will increase it all that much more. But other things internal of your PC also play a role in your graphics processing capabilities. The faster you processor is, the more ram your system has , and if you are using a 7200rpm or 5400rpm IDE hard drive, can adversely affect how you machine process graphics. Another key factor in how your graphics look on screen is exactly that the quality and type of the monitor you are using.
So there is a video card out there for any kind of user at just about any budget. You just need to decide witch one best suits your needs.
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