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What they do |
| They allow us to see on the screen (100% of
what we see, from the operating system to games). If we remove the
graphic card, the screen will be black... |
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Quality to consider before purchasing one |
The most important factors are compatibility and speed. The
compatibility of a graphic card is first seen when you load games:
lots of games will not work if you have a low quality graphic card,
or too old, or one whose drivers are hard to find. In this case,
speed wil not help at all.The second inmportant factor is obviously
speed: nobody wants to play a game that does not run smoothly.
Look exclusively for graphic cards with Ati Radeon and NVidia
GeForce chipsets.Both are good.
As to the memory of the graphic card, aim to have at least 128 MB
DDR (pay attention to the speed of the memory. It is not unusual to
find cheap cards with lots of memory not DDR...these cards are very
slow, and are generally the first cards that some people try to sell
to inexperienced customers). Usually, versions with written on the
label Pro or XT have a high quality memory, versions SE or where
nothing is written are of much lower quality.
Avoid motherboards with intergrated video cards... if one of the two
has a problem, you'll have to replace everything.
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The average price of a reasonable quality graphic card is usually
over 100 USD (about 200 for the good quality ones and more for
excellent quality). If you don't play with games, then a graphic
card from a good brand costing around 60 USD would be ok (several
games would not be compatible). |
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Brands to keep in mind (Video Cards sale) |
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Other brands to consider are Hercules 3D Prophet, Triplex, but also
Sapphire, GeXCube, Asus, and others. |
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