Take care when buying a graphics card
If you are serious about the quality of graphics on your PC, you would naturally go in for a graphics card. A graphics card is known by various names such as a display adapter, graphics accelerator card, expansion card or video card, among others. By definition, a graphics card is a component of PC hardware which is plugged into your PC’s motherboard. It generates much better images or graphics to your PC. It works just as a sound card would.
Graphics Card
Functions: You can choose a graphics card, whether you are upgrading an existing PC or buying a new one. Apart from offering better images, video cards also have other functions such as video capture, mouse, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding, TV tuner adapter, FireWire, light pen and joystick connectors. Some graphics cards can also connect multiple monitors.
How to select a graphics card: Before you zero in on any one card, ask yourself why you want one. This is because you’re sure to find their naming conventions just a little bit too daunting. If you want it to play games, then be more specific. Which games do you want it for? Which video output options and ports would you need?
Once you receive answers to these questions, ask yourself how much money you’re willing to spend. Usually, about $200 should be enough to get you a decent graphics card, a new GPU and enough VRAM for games for a long time. Then, move on to the other specifications as listed below.
- Integrated graphics: Usually, motherboards come with integrated graphics features and work without a separate graphics card. At this level, they can handle 2-D images easily, which makes them ideal for Internet applications, so if you add an independent graphics card into your motherboard, it can serve to prevail over your existing graphics card and its functions.
- TV and video connections: There are some cards that also come with TV and video connections and a TV tuner. To judge a good card, go by its frame rate, that is measured in frames per second (FPS). This will tell you how many images the card can display in a second. A fast video game needs at least 60 FPS, so this can give you an idea of choosing a good graphics card.
- 3-D images: These images are made up of triangles. Through this, you can see the speed of the GPU to calculate the speed at which the card makes up an entire wire frame image.
- Pixel fill rate: From this, it will be easy to tell how many pixels the GPU can process every second.
- Overclocking: To improve one’s performance with the graphics card, you could choose to set your clock speed higher or overclock it. However, this could lead to overheating and nullifies the manufacturer’s warranty.
- GPU clock speed (MHz)
- Size of the memory bus (bits)
- Available memory (MB)
- Rate of memory clock (MHz)
- Memory bandwidth (GB/s)
- RAMDAC speed (MHz)
Buy EVGA 01G-P3-N945-LR GeForce 9400 GT 1GB DDR2 PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card
[ReviewAZON asin="B001EH8FZA" display="fullpost"]
Related Posts:
Latest Comments