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Video Card Upgrade Guide:
Recommendations about How to Choose Graphic Card
Graphic card is a video processor or chipset specially designed to speed the display and rendering of graphical objects onscreen which is installed on your motherboard. Graphic card has integrated function with monitor. The ability of each graphic card is various. A lot of features have been offered by each graphic card manufacturer. Because of its function, i.e. displaying graphics, graphic card become extremely important for your computer. Many 3D graphic card features have been implemented to boost graphics performance generated by a graphic card.
Usually, your motherboard has a built in chipset integrated graphic to integrate graphics into the memory controller hub or North Bridge chip. The amount of memory it has is taken from your system memory (i.e. amount of RAM). This is called shared memory. Your motherboard has a limitation on how much amount of shared video memory it can handle. Integrated graphic typically offer lower performance compared to dedicated graphic card. Integrated graphic is not strong enough to render complex 3D graphics. You should upgrade your integrated graphic to dedicated graphic card because it is more stable and the one you can rely on when processing graphics. Dedicated video card has its own memory; it can help your system performance because your dedicated video card won't eat your system memory.
If you want to upgrade your integrated graphic to dedicated graphic card, you need additional electric power, additional fan, additional power supply, and often additional system memory, because dedicated graphic card really absorb more power in order to run.
Here are some recommendations about how to choose a dedicated graphic card:
Amount of Video Memory
For today’s needs, your graphic card's memory should have at least 128 MB of video memory. For you that not really need multimedia application on your computer, you should choose a graphic card that have at least 64 MB amount of memory.
AGP or PCI Express
Latest graphic cards are PCI Express type, but the older graphic card would be AGP type. However, PCI Express is a new technology in the graphic card world. This is far better than AGP and also faster.
Motherboard
You should know what type of slot available in your motherboard, is it PCI Express or AGP. This is because if you buy a PCI Express graphic card whereas your motherboard slot is AGP, your graphic card will simply doesn't match because it isn't compatible with your motherboard. Majority of newest release motherboards will have a PCI Express slot on it, which means that motherboard supports PCI Express graphic card.
Brand and Price
Various brands of graphic card are now available in the market with various price ranges. The most wanted and most used graphic card nowadays is graphic card made by nVidia and ATI. Graphic card from those brands can be expensive, but they have high quality. However there are more other brands that have enough quality with a relatively cheaper in price.
Purpose
If you intend to buy a graphic card just for playing general games that only need little video memory and also for general applications, you just need to buy a cheap graphic card with the amount of memory based on your needs. But if your intention is to meet the system requirement of newest release game, then you need famous and high quality brand of graphic card that also have expensive price. This is necessary to run your desired application / games smoothly.
Features
Choose a graphic card that have newest features and at least it has standard features, like shading, antialiasing, texture mapping, animation, etc. Always check graphic card documentation to ensure what features it brings. It's good to choose graphic card with special feature such as CrossFire Technology from ATI and SLI Technology from nVidia. Description of several major features of a graphic card can be found here.
Direct X
Direct X is a set of graphics-related drivers and APIs that translate generic hardware commands into specific commands for particular pieces of hardware. It developed by Microsoft. DirectX lets graphical or multimedia applications take advantage of specific features supported by various graphics accelerators. Direct X used by hardware and software vendors to create drivers and programs that can work quickly and reliably across a wide variety of platforms. Usually, major graphic card manufacturers implemented the leading game APIs include SGI's OpenGL and Microsoft's Direct 3D as parts of Direct X. Choose a graphic card that at least supports Direct X 9.0, or better it supports Direct X 10.
TV Output
Choose the graphic card that has TV output. It will make a lot of advantages.
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Recommendations about How to Choose Graphic Card
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