Factors to consider in buying video card?

Question

Help. Tnx

Answer 1

1. Price - so that you do not burn a hole on your wallet
2. Compatibility with graphics slot on the motherboard. 8x AGP or x16 PCIe.
3. GPU architecture- more shaders or stream processors the better. The better cards have at least 12 pixel shaders or 32 stream processors.
4. Core clock speed- 500 mhz or higher is better.
5. On board memory clock speed - higher is better. Get ddr3. 256Mb ddr3 beats 512Mb ddr2.
6. The fast cards draw 4 amps or more on the +12V rail of the power supply. Be sure to have a power supply with strong +12V rail (16 amps or higher) if you will get a mainstream card. Monster cards will require much higher amps.

Answer 2

Graphics Cards : The two primary competitors NVIDIA & AMD/ATI (ATI were purchased by CPU maker AMD and have merged with AMD but they still use the ATI brand name for graphics cards so they are often referred to as AMD/ATI).

Generally there are two types of card Direct-X 9 {DX9} & Direct-X 10 {DX10} the DX10 cards can only use DX10 mode in Windows Vista with supporting games of course. They will operate in DX9 mode under Windows XP which will still be the dominant API for years to come anyway.

ATI
ATI high end line X1950 - replaced X1800/X1900 {DX9 class cards)
ATI mid range X1600X/1650 line (DX9 class cards)
ATI low end X1300/X1500 line (DX9 class card)

Noteworthy features;
* Generally better image quality and features compared to NVIDIA Geforce 6 & 7 series GPU's.
* AVIVO video decoder gives excellent picture quality for DVD's and comes free with all X1K series GPU's.

NVIDIA
NV high end line 8800 (DX10 class cards)
NV mid range 7900/7600 (DX9 class cards)
NV low end 7400/7300/7100 (DX9 class cards)

Noteworthy features;
* GeForce 8 line is cream of the crop for NVIDIA and finally bests ATI in the image quality department.
* Generally NVIDIA tend to get the price/performance ratio right more often than ATI in the mid-range.