video card : Computer Hardware Buyers’ Glossary

The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local international currency, e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees… CurrCon requires an up-to-date browser and Java version 1.5 or later, preferably 1.7.0_04. If you can’t see the prices in your local currency, Troubleshoot

video card

The video card (ako graphics adapter or video adapter) is a card that fits in the 16x PCI-E (Peripheral Component Interconnect — Express) slot (or the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot or one of the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slots in older computers) that generates the image that appears on the screen. The image is made of dots called pixels. For example, on a 17" monitor the image might be 1024 dots wide by 768 deep. There are thus 786,432 pixels. People with 21 inch monitors may have an image 1280 × 1024 pixels. The smallest monitors might support only 640 × 480 pixels. About 70 times a second, the graphics adapter sends the entire picture, dot by dot, to the screen. For high resolution colour, inside the video graphics adapter, there are three numbers for each dot. One tells how red the dot is, a number from 0 for no red, to 255 for very red, one tells how green it is, and one how blue. 0,0,0 is black. 255,255,255 is white. 255,0,0 is bright red. 0,255,0 is bright green. 0,128,0 is dark green. 0,255,255 is bright yellow. The computer changes the picture by manipulating the numbers associated with each pixel. This scheme gives over 16 million colours. Low res colour might have only one number 0 to 15 associated with each pixel. This works much faster and requires less hidden RAM (Random Access Memory) on the video card, but allows only 16 different colours on the screen at once. A compromise might be 256 or 65,536 different colours.

Most graphics cards today go into a special PCI-Express-16 aka PCI-E slot. Older motherboards use an AGP slot. Modern graphics cards use a digital DVI-D (Digital Video Interface — Data) external connector or an integrated analog-digital DVI-I (Digital Video Interface — Integrated) external connector. High end ones use HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) connectors.

Sometimes the video adapter in integrated into the motherdoard. Add on cards cost from $60.00 CAD to $600.00 CAD . Gamers can spend even more on the video card than they do on the computer. Features to look for:

Video processor speed in MHz or GHz. Bigger is better, possibly dual processors for the high end.
Video RAM size. in Mb or Gb. Bigger is better.
DVI (Digital Video Interface) or HDMI connector (modern monitors are digital).
Fits in a spare slot of the right type and version on your motherboard.
Maximum resolution, now typically 2560 × 1599 It should be at least the max resolution of your monitor.


analog VGA (Video Graphics Adapter)	digital DVI-D	integrated DVI-I	HDMI for HDTV (High Definition Television)

Real World Cards

Most cards support Windows 7. If you have Linux or a Mac, you need to check it is compatible and comes with suitable drivers. Ditto for older Windows OSes. See notes on PCI-Express. The cards are listed in increasing order of cost.

recommend electronic⇒Palit GT 220 Video Card

asin: B002VJJO9G

1 gig of DDR2 RAM, Uses a PCI-E slot. It has two DVI outputs and HDMI. Palit is known for bold colours and sexy styling. The RAMDAC GPU runs at 400 MHz. Supports DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.1 and Windows 7.

	amazon.de	amazon.ca
	amazon.es	tigerdirect.ca
	amazon.fr	newegg.ca
	amazon.it	amazon.com
	amazon.co.uk	tigerdirect.com
		newegg.com

Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

recommend electronic⇒Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850 Video Card

asin: B0047ZGIUK

1 gig of DDR-5 RAM, Uses a PCI-E 2.0 16-bit slot. It has two DVI outputs and HDMI. The RAMDAC GPU runs at 775 MHz. Accesses RAM 256 bits at a pop. Supports DirectX 11 and Windows 7. details.

	amazon.de	amazon.ca
	amazon.es	tigerdirect.ca
	amazon.fr	newegg.ca
	amazon.it	amazon.com
	amazon.co.uk	tigerdirect.com
		newegg.com

Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

recommend electronic⇒NVIDIA Quadro 6000 by PNY

asin: B0044XUD1U

Has 448 Cuda processing cores. Has 6 Gig of GDDR3 RAM. It accesses ECS memory 512 bits at a pop. DVI-I connectors. Takes up two PCI Express gen 2 × 16 slots. Supports Stereo OpenGL 4.1, DirectX 11.0, CUDA, and OpenCL. It consumes a whopping 204 watts. Very expensive. Specs.

	amazon.de	amazon.ca
	amazon.es	tigerdirect.ca
	amazon.fr	newegg.ca
	amazon.it	amazon.com
	amazon.co.uk	tigerdirect.com
		newegg.com

Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock

Crossfire is a technique for allowing up to four video cards to work in a single machine either to control multiple monitors or to speed up response.

When you buy a monitor or video card, check which sorts of connector and cable they use. You need a match and you need a cable which could cost upward of $50.00 USD extra.

I was blown away when my Samsung monitor came with three cables: for VGA, DVI-D and HDMI.

AGP
GPU
graphics accelerator
NVIDIA
OpenGL
resolution
Video card benchmark comparisons
Video card cables and connectors
video-drivers.com

	You can get the freshest copy of this page from:	or possibly from your local J: drive (Java virtual drive/mindprod.com website mirror)
	http://mindprod.com/bgloss/videocard.html	J:\mindprod\bgloss\videocard.html
	Please email your feedback for publication, letters to the editor, errors, omissions, typos, formatting errors, ambiguities, unclear wording, broken/redirected link reports, suggestions to improve this page or comments to Roedy Green : . If you want your message, your name or email kept confidential, not considered for public posting, please explicitly specify that. Unless you state otherwise, I will treat your message as a letter to the editor that I may or may not publish in the feedback section. After that, it will be too late to retract it. If you disagree with something I said, please quote it and cite the web page where you found it, tell me why you think it is wrong, and, if possible, provide some supporting evidence. Threatening to kill me or spouting obscenities has yet to persuade me to change my mind.
	Canadian Mind Products
	mindprod.com IP:[65.110.21.43]
view	Your face IP:[38.107.179.213]
Feedback	You are visitor number 5,786.