Upgrading your PC

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Published on: 23-05-2004
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Graphics Cards

When to upgrade the graphics card

Hard drives and sockets are useful devices but, lets face it, they’re not the most exciting things you can plug into your PC. If you’re a “games fan” then graphics cards are a much more excitable product to get worked up about. A good graphics card can dazzle you with amazing 3D visual feasts that are starting to approach the quality you see in a Hollywood blockbuster.

The main thing to remember about the modern graphics card is that they’re primarily designed for 3D graphics which, for the home user, means games. If you’re only interested in 2D graphic applications such as office work, video or photo-editing, then a new graphics card is not an essential piece of kit.

For the games fan, the latest, greatest graphics cards are a must-have item on their shopping list. An entire article could be devoted to graphics cards alone, not least because they’ve all got incredibly confusing names. It’s hard to tell ATI’s Radeon X800 Pro from the nVidia FX 5200 Ultra, especially when ATI & nVidia (the two companies that currently dominate the graphics card market) also sell their graphics cards (or the chips that make a card what it is) to lots of other companies who then slap their own brand names onto them, making it difficult to keep up with the large variety of cards available.

But, as a quick rule of thumb, there are two details that are worth taking note of. The raw speed of a graphics card can be measured by the number of “pixels” that flash onto the screen every second (the word ‘pixel’ is short for ‘picture elements; in other words, the coloured dots that make up the image you see on-screen). This is sometimes referred to as the fill rate of the card and if you look at the “tech specs” on the nVidia and ATI websites, you’ll find that the Radeon X800 has a fill-rate of 5.7 billion pixels per second, while the FX5200 Ultra is closer to 1 billion pixels per second. This tells us that the Radeon is a top-of-the-range card aimed squarely at the hard core gamer, while the FX5200 Ultra is a more affordable, mass-market model. A quick look at a few prices on some online retailer websites confirms this, with the X800-base cards costing an average of £300 or more, while the FX5200 comes in at well under £70.

Another detail to look out for is the amount of video memory (sometimes known as VRAM) built into the graphics card. This is a special type of high-speed memory chip that helps the graphics card to process complex visual effects. Many modern games require a graphics card that has a least 32MB of video memory. High-end cards such as the X800 may have as much as 256Mb, but a good compromise for most home users is to opt for a card that has at least 64 to 128Mb. This amount of video memory should be able to cope with most of the games on the market today.

There is just one other detail that you need to watch out for. Most graphics cards produced in the last two years plug into an AGP slot on your motherboard. The latest generation of graphics cards to hit the market are designed for a newer type of expansion slot known as PCI Express. These new cards will be incredibly fast, but very few PCs have got this new type of slot at the moment; any PC old enough to need an upgrade is most certain not to have such a slot. The good news is that the majority of new graphics cards are available with a choice of interface. Just make sure the one you buy is compatible with your PC.

Sound Cards

Does your sound card need upgrading?

Gamers are also one of the main audiences for new sound cards. However, most PCs released in the past 2/3 years have perfectly good sound cards that provide excellent quality stereo output. There’s really no need to buy a new sound card unless you’re planning to perform and record your own music, or you’re looking for features such as surround sound for games of films.