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VIDEO CARD
How to choose the right video card
Find a video card
A video card or graphics card is specially designed to control what images and graphics are displayed on your computer screen. Your computer monitor connects directly to your video card and is located in the back of the computer. Many motherboards are equipped with "on board" video cards or graphics cards; however, for those computer users who demand high quality graphics and high graphics-intensive games the "on board" video card will not suffice. A higher quality video card is a must have for these levels of graphics performance. A video cards quality is measured by the amount of video RAM, refresh rate, and max screen resolution that can be output. There are basically three categories of cards that can be found and they include PCI, PCI express, and AGP.
You can spend hundreds of dollars when purchasing a video card for your computer so do some research before making the purchase. The first step to consider is defining your purpose for purchasing a new high end video card, this will make the buying process much easier.
There are many different brands of video cards to consider when making a purchase. Some common brand names include: geforce, ATI, Radeon, Nvidia, Asus, XFX, BFG, eVGA, Leadtek, Chaintek, Connect3D, Diablotek, Diamond Multimedia, MSI, PNY. There are also different types of video cards that can perform different functions. There are simple video cards as I mentioned earlier that are built into the motherboard, some of which are good quality and more than enough graphics power to display word processing tasks, watch videos in lower quality, play many games and many other functions. There are also video cards called TV tuner cards or devices that allow you to watch television through your computer. There are dual output video cards allowing you to output to two different devices. Then there are hundreds of different levels of video cards that range in price from under $20 to over $500!
Just to give you an example of the number of different brand/types of video cards I want to list a few. This is only a small fraction of the cards available for purchase.
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro, XFX GeForce 7900 GS, EVGA NF51 nForce 4, XFX GeForce 6800, Diamond S120 Radeon 9550, BFG GeForce 6800 GS OC, EVGA GeForce MX 4000, 3DFuzion GeForce FX , XFX GeForce 6800 xtreme and the list continues...
Purchasing a video or graphics card online can save you a lot of money. My favorite store to purchase from is tigerdirect. It is a very dependable company and can be trusted. I have used them for personal and business purchases and highly recommend them for their excellent customer service and timely shipping.