Nvidia & ATi Video Cards Explained

[JimMayor007]

Although this guide is mainly based on video cards, it was impossible not to cover a bit of the other topics associated with upgrading a video card.

Nvidia GeForce and ATi Radeon Buyers Guide

What do you need a graphics card for? Word processing, internet browsing, gaming?

Many computers have built in (integrated) video cards. This means that when you plug your monitor into the VGA (video graphics array) slot, you're plugging it directly onto a port that is part of the motherboard. This slot is good enough to take you down the internet highway and view sites. Or to do some work on excel, word, or maybe just for sending emails. These are very simple tasks for a graphics "card".

What if you hunger to play the latest games on your PC? Well odds are, your onboard video wont do the job. This is most likely what brought you here.

You've heard that you need a video card and you probably looked through the thousands of listings offering you one, but what does everything mean? If anything, you're probably more confused now than when you started looking into buying a video card.

There are 2 main manufacturers you want to look for when buying a video card, ATi and Nvidia.

Important Information for choosing a Video card

 

[raybay]

So you are publishing a short guide on video cards while on your first post? Great! We need more brave souls on this forum.
We do already have a large number of excellent posts on Video Cards. We will shall see what we shall see.
But this one you posted appears to have been posted on another site. I am not sure, but I think that is a no no on Tech Spot. You might want to ask Julio and the other powers that be.

 

[resu]

its pretty cool .. looks like alot of time has been spent on this
thanks for the link

may aswell just copy and paste the whole thing over to here if linking out is banned

 

[CMH]

Its hard to write guides for hardware, because the hardware changes over time. Unless someone's willing to update their guide as time goes on, they just become outdated after awhile...

As it is, I think the eBay guide is dumbed down way too much, but it may be of some help to some users which have absolutely no prior knowledge of computers (AGP and PCIe? I've got PCI slots, are they the same?)