How to upgrade your video card all by yourself! Michael has simple instructions with no technical jargon and will give you very good explanations on every aspect about video cards.
The video card that is inside of your computer is responsible for what you are seeing on your monitor right now and how well your PC games play. Video cards, Guest Post also known as graphic cards, can come pre-built into your motherboard or can be an actual card that fits securely into a slot on your motherboard. Either way, your video card is very important, and becomes more important as graphics become more demanding slot games.
First let’s talk about what type of video cards there are, and which one you should get. Upgrading your current video card has become a very simple task because it only slides right into a slot on your computer. Your video card can go into one of two slots, PCI or AGP. Chances are that your computer has both, but which one is the best you ask? By far AGP is the better technology since it processes data much faster than PCI. Unfortunately if you have a computer that was bought before the year 2000, most likely you don’t have an AGP slot, or at least not the fastest. Yes, AGP slots can come at many different speeds too, like 1x, 2x and so on and so forth.
Now that you know about AGP and PCI, you need to find out which one your computer can use. Every computer has a PCI slot, so a PCI video card should be fine for anyone, but if you want to use the faster and better AGP technology then you need to find out if your computer has an AGP slot. You can do this in one of three ways, call your computer manufacturer and ask, read your PC’s instruction manual, or open up your computer and look for a brown slot on your motherboard. PCI slots are usually white and AGP are brown, but it can be different for other computers. So just remember this, a PCI slot is bigger then an AGP slot, so if you have a slot that is smaller then the rest, that is your AGP.
Next we talk about the features on your video card, and what they are all about. If you are a computer beginner or novice, then you need to know two important things about video cards. First is their memory size, which basically means how much RAM the video card has. The more the better obviously, but to much can be a waste of money, so just be sure to get the right amount for what you plan on doing. Second are graphics capabilities, now there are all kinds of technical terms like floating points, pixels and lots of other technical gibberish. If you are a Windows user, all you need to focus on is the DirectX capabilities. DirectX is the software used to process the graphics information, so make sure you get a video card that supports the latest DirectX version. Find out what the latest version of DirectX is by going to Microsoft’s website.
