Graphics Card

Graphics card provides display output to your monitor. There are many graphics card manufactures out there who release a new card into the market nearly every three to six months as it is one of the most competitive hardware market. While choosing a graphics card consider what you would be using it for. For 2D applications such as word-processing, spreadsheet etc, a basic graphics card with around 8MB or 16MB graphics memory will be sufficient for your needs. It will also allow you to run your monitor at various resolutions. However, if you require 3D functionality for running 3D applications or playing 3D games you will require a 3D graphics card with at least 128MB or even 256MB of video memory.

You can buy graphics card with a PCI , AGP or PCI-Express bus. However, most current motherboards have AGP or PCI-E slot and you should therefore use an AGP or PCI-E graphics card if your motherboard has an AGP or PCI-E slot. PCI Express graphics card offers much higher graphics bandwidth which results in higher performance. The current top end graphics card are made by Nvida (Geforce cards) and ATI (Radeon cards). The graphics card that we will use for our demonstration PC is a GEFORCE II 64MB AGP card as shown below.