How to Build Your Own PC - Page 6

The Graphic Card

For those who are planning to use a built-in graphics, you may skip this part. Please continue to read if you wanted to upgrade your PCs. You may find this part useful. Many mainboard with built-in graphics nowadays supports an add-on slot for graphic card. But those mainboard with built-in graphics may not support your graphic card or not fully compatible with your graphic card.

The graphic card provides display output to your monitor. As for built-in graphic card, they will use your system's RAM for its texture rendering. The PCI-express or its simply called PCI-e and AGP(Advanced Graphic Port) graphic card has its own onboard RAM for texture rendering. PCI Express graphics card offers much higher graphics bandwidth which results in higher performance. The current top end graphics card are made by nVidia (Geforce cards) and ATI (Radeon cards). The speed of the card will be determined by its technology support such as Pixel shader 4.0, HDR-R(High Dynamic Range Rendering), the chipset's core clock frequency and memory frequency.

As most of you know, most of the PC games now needs a DirectX 9 support. Meaning that your graphic card must supports at least DirectX 9 engine in order to play computer games.

Criteria for choosing a 3D Graphic Card.

1. There are many graphic card with Direct X 10 support now and there are many graphic card manufacturer that makes these card. Leadtek, Asus, ABIT, MSI and Sapphire is known to be among the best graphic card manufacturer out there.
2. For smooth gaming experience, get a card with a high GPU clock frequency, a board using 256-bit memory and at least 256MB onboard memory capacity. Of course, if you have a good budget, get two same card with an SLI technology for maximum gaming experience.
3. Get either ATI with an 'XT' sign at the end of its model e.g. ATI Radeon 2600XT. XT is meaning... its like "hey i'm the extreme performer of all my family" and for nVidia with GT sign at the end of its model e.g. nVidia 8600GT. GT is like.. "i'm fast like a grand turismo cars!".

Conclusion

The graphic card is the heart of gaming type of PC. Make sure u have a good budget if u tend to make one. If you are on a budget but trying to make a good gaming performer PC, get a card with at least DirectX 10 support and at least 128-bit of memory interface.

Build Your Own PC - Page 7