Info on cheap video cards

 
Every computer needs a video card of some sort. Whether it’s a chipset build into the motherboard or a seperate card that slots into either the PCIe slot or the AGP slot. PCIe stands for “Peripheral Component Interconnect Express” and AGP stands for “Accelerated Graphcs Port. Most people these days will be using either one of these standards allthough AGP is slowly becoming obsolete if it hasn’t done so already.

When picking a video card for your PC, there a number of things you should consider before buying. First of course you need to know whether your motherboard uses AGP or PCIe. You can check this by either looking into the manual that either came with your PC/motherboard, or you can physically check inside your PC.

AGP slot looks like this (brown slot):

PCIe slot looks like this (white slots):

Don’t get too confused with the picture of the pcie slots. The long black one is the one you would use for your graphic card. The smaller pcie x1 slot is used for other types of expanison cards such as sound cards.

Once you have figured out whether you need an AGP video card or a PCI express video card you should now ask yourself three questions.

1. What is your budget?
2. Are you a gamer?
3. Do you care about high detailed graphics?

If you’re a gamer getting the fastest graphics card isn’t always possible. Most likely because the fastest cards are usually very expensive and way over one’s budget. If this is the case, which it probably is if you’re reading this, there are a couple of places on the net that you can check out and pick a suitable video card within budget. The first place is newegg.com and the second one is Ebay. Ebay probably has the best deals on anything you’re looking for but Newegg is very good because of the user reviews they have of each product. I suggest comparing video card prices on both sites and reading the reviews found and newegg to help in your decision.

Currently there are two companies that dominate the graphics chipset market; ATi and Nvidia. Don’t stress yourself too much over which company you prefer, they are both good. Some people will fight about this issue of who is the best and you may come across these people in many forums lol but just ignore those arguments.

For a good forum to read up on fast performing graphics cards check out xtremesystems.org or if your looking for a budget card just so you can view your desktop :p check out cheapvideocards.net.

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