Upgrading Your Graphics Card – Essential Tips

Well before you start looking for the right Graphics Cards to compliment your existing system you need to understand what these cards are and what they do.

What Do You Use Your Computer For?

Before you go diving straight in it would be a sensible idea to assess your actual needs, for example do you play games?. Do you have an older collection of games or are you looking to buy the latest releases?

If most of them are 2-D models, you’ll get the most from the graphic cards that are on the market today without needing the more expensive 3-D acceleration. One thing to be on the lookout for is the power of your CPU as this may cause issues. Exercise caution before making a purchase. Getting the latest upgrade when you’ve got an older chip in your computer will be a waste since the two won’t be compatible.

Not All Cards Are The Same

You may not be aware but people are often caught out by the different card slot types available, simply put if you get the wrong one it will not fit in your system. Depending on your mainboard there will be a choice of suitable card types; AGP – Pci, and Pci-e

Do You Have Enough Computer Memory?

Quite often doing a graphic card upgrade will also require a memory upgrade too!

Graphics cards have different amounts of memory and the better (in most cases) the card the greater the memory, and if your computer system only has a small amount of memory then you will run into a big snag as there will be insufficient memory to allocate to your system hardware and the card will either not install or your pc will become vary slow.

Is Your Power Supply Good Enough?

The larger the card the more power they will generally draw from your power supply so you need to be aware of this as well, the older the power supply the smaller it may be, and it may only be around 300w or there abouts, so depending on if you have already added additional hardware to your system, this may cause a power drain which can cause system instability. Also be aware of the fact that many of the new breed of graphics cards may need an alternative direct power connection so open your case and make sure that a spare connector is not only available, but is also long enough to reach the card.

Is My Case Suitable?

This is one aspect that is often totally forgotten about but some cases will be quite small or depending on the main board manufacturer, graphic card space may have not been a major consideration when the board was designed so a newer card will simply not fit!

Typically newer cards are much longer and much deeper than older less powerful cards. With newer cards working a lot harder they tend to generate a lot more heat so onboard cooling has been increase. This tends to lead to a thicker card as well so you may need to move other Pci cards to accommodate a larger graphics card.

A graphics card upgrade is worth the effort but you do need to take account of the above considerations, but if you are after the ultimate gaming experience and your computer is over 3-4 years old you may be better off just buying a new one.

For more great advice about computer upgrades visit our business IT support website.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 2:12 am and is filed under Computers . You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.