What is a graphics card?

A graphics card or GPU(Graphics processing unit) is a card that will plug into an expansion slot on your mother-board. The GPU is an additional processor that takes care of the calculations that generate the picture you see on your screen. The GPU takes the load off of the CPU so it has more power to use for other functions. The graphics card will often have multiple cores on its processing unit and also have its own on board RAM. The use of a graphics card can increase speed of you system and is often needed for playing games with high intensity graphics.

How to choose your graphics card?

You need to know what you intend to do with your computer, if you just want to use it to do internet browsing and writing word documents and email than the card that is built into your motherboard should suffice. If you want to play games with high intensive graphics or do video editing this is when you would want to look into getting a GPU. All this being said how do you know which one to get? There are thousands on the market starting from as little as $40 all the way to $600+.

There are sites out there like Video Card Benchmark out there that have benchmark scores of many different GPU’s to compare, basically the higher the score the better the card.

But still how do you know how much power you need in your card. Well once you know what you intend to do with your computer and what you intend to run on there, do some research. Look up the requirements and recommended hardware for the software you want to use and then base your needs off that. I always go extra then what the site says because you want it to run smoothly and not put to much stress on your system. You can also check out forums, Yahoo answers has a lot of information, many people have asked questions about them. Don’t take anything as 100% correct, make sure you find more than one source for your information because somebody could just be trolling you and telling you to get a shit one just for a laugh.