Choosing a Graphcs Card

Choosing a graphics card for your computer system is probably more important than you think, especially if you intend to use your computer for gaming or watching HD movies. Most systems can get away with a cheap video card but if you want to watch HD movies, Play 3d games or do anything that might require more than normal graphics power you will need to purchase a decent graphics card.

Graphics Card For Entry / Medium Level Computer

For the entry / medium level computers we will recommend you to use the onboard graphics card which is built in to your motherboard. These graphic cards do a very good job with 2d graphics. They also do a half decent job with 3d graphics but they are not recommended.


You should be able to view HD films with no problems on the built in graphics card (HD Ready at 720), But if you do plan on watching full HD films I would recommend you to buy a motherboard with an inbuilt graphics card supplied by nvidia or ATI. Intel graphic cards generally come built in to motherboards, and these graphic cards are not the best to be playing HD video. If the onboard graphics card is not up to the job you can always buy a dedicated graphics card and install it in to your system.

Graphics Card For High Level Computer

If you want to play full HD video and also graphic intensive games with your computer you will need to buy a good graphics card. The two best companies that make graphic cards are nvidia and ATI, there are also other company’s that develop graphic cards but nvidia and ATI are miles ahead of them.

First thing you need to look for in a graphics card is what form you need?? Check your motherboard what forms of graphics card it supports. Your motherboard will support either, AGP, PCI, PCI Express. Now you will need to select a graphics card with this form.
A graphics card comes with built in ram, Basically the graphics / images on your screen are being held in the graphics card ram. The more ram you have, the more pixels (Better the picture) you can have. I would recommend you buy a graphics card with a minimum of 512mb of ram and will recommend 1gb of ram.

GPU speed counts

The GPU is basically is a processor that is built in to your graphics card. You will need a fast GPU / clock speed if you want to watch HD movies at the highest resolution (1080) or play games with the highest graphics settings.