Choosing the best graphics card: ITReviews.com Buyer's Guide
Price and performance for 3D gaming and everyday work
01 August, 2011 by IT Reviews Staff
Buying a graphics card can be an important step in upgrading an old machine, or turning a bargain-basement purchase into a gaming powerhouse - but it's a market that moves faster than any other, and yesterday's dream product is today's scrap metal. To avoid buying a card that's not up to scratch - or investing a very expensive mistake - just follow ITReviews' simple, no-nonsense advice.
Compatibility
When purchasing an add-in graphics card, the most important step is to ensure that it's compatible with your system. The vast majority of graphics cards on the market today use a type of connection slot called a 16x PCI-Express, (PCIe) which is almost universally supported by all recent motherboards.
Most PC motherboards offer at least one PCIe 16x slot, shown here in black.
If you have an older system with an Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) or original PCI slot, however, you'll find your choices sorely limited - and it might be time to think about upgrading your motherboard or PC, instead of just your graphics card.
It's not just the electrical connectivity you should be worrying about, either: at the higher end of the market, you'll start to find the physical size of the graphics card increases massively, both in width and length. Dual-slot cards, which block access to a nearby PCIe slot, are commonplace, and extra-long boards could block hard drive bays. If you're unsure about your case, it's time to break out the tape measure - most retailers include the size of the card in the product details.
Because the graphics card market moves so quickly, buying the latest cutting-edge hardware can be extremely costly. The flipside, however, is that last-generation products can be had at a substantial discount, and still offer plenty of bang for your buck.
If you're going to play 3D games on your PC, make sure your graphics card has at least 512MB of DDR2 memory, and check that it's compatible with Microsoft's DirectX 11 graphics standard. Even if you're running Windows XP, which only offers DirectX 9 hardware support, it's worth investing in a card that you won't need to replace if you make the move to Windows 7 as your primary operating system.
AMD vs Nvidia
There are two main camps in the dedicated graphics market: AMD, which got into the game by acquiring graphics specialist ATI and its popular line of Radeon GPUs, and Nvidia. Depending on the amount you want to spend and the features you need, you may find one or the other offering the most suitable card.
You'll find when you're shopping that there are multiple manufacturers to choose from, including Palit, Sapphire, MSI, and Zotac. These areknown as 'board partners', who buy the main chip or 'graphics processing unit' (GPU) and a reference design from Nvidia or AMD, and build their own graphics cards. The specifications are usually very similar, so unless you have very specific requirements - such as water-cooling, or designs that are compatible with small form factor PCs - pick whichever offers the best price and warranty.
As with any other purchase, the graphics card market can be split into three segments: budget, mainstream, and premium.
