Things You'll Need:
- Computer(PC or Mac), Video or Graphics Card, if you have no experience, then see your local retailer for more help. Patience.
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Step 1
The first step on deciding which graphics or video card is best for our needs. Since we are mostly going to be playing mostly online games, a video card would be best suitable for our needs because one, the memory made available to video rendering is great. Gigabyte video cards are essential for online gaming which is at least a gigabyte of video that is made available to our already capable computer that we have. Most computers today can run any late model video card without really any upgrades. However, the more R.A.M (Random Access Memory) we have in our computer, the better. Though anything of or better than 512 Megabyte's of R.A.M. especially of D.D.R. 1 through 5( Double Data Rate) is more than sufficient. Also it is good to know by looking on the motherboard to be able to specify whether it's a pci or agp card for a more complete and better understanding. This way you can also determine what yoou and your budget can work with.
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Step 2
Now that we have figured out the type of video card we will be using, we need to know where to purchase this piece of hardware to give our graphics area a better view. Normally we can get them at a local Wally World or if your wanting to get really into it, you can go to any computer outlet and buy a high end video card made especially for online or offline game play. This way you get what you pay for and you know what your getting especially if it came from a computer outlet. While at the computer outlet, if your not a handy person on knowing where to put your new video card, ask them to install it for you and should not take any time at all, and they might even do it for free.
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Step 3
Now we can take our new computer with our newly installed video card and test it out with the games that we have wanted to play. This way we will know whether it works the way we wanted it to. Also the video card will give some extra added stability to our system and possibly make it run tremendously better.
Comments
bigbern12 said
on 8/4/2009 CAN ANYONE TELL ME WHAT CHEAP CARD I CAN GET FOR A DELL DIMENSION 3700 32 BIT SYSTEM WITH 3GB OF RAM WITHOUT HAVING TO UPGRADE POWER SUPPLY?
OnlineSimRacer said
on 10/4/2008 Thanks alot for the addition to the article and I'm glad you found it helpful as I hope many others will. Thanks for the comments.
dukethepcdr said
on 10/4/2008 cont. In your article, you said you need a GB of RAM on the video card. While there are some very expensive cards out there with that much RAM, they are more than the vast majority of games require (don't know of any games that require a GB of video RAM). A card with 256 or 512 MB of video RAM on it is plenty for almost all games.
dukethepcdr said
on 10/4/2008 Nice article. Fairly well written. However, you forgot a few crucial steps. Look at your motherboard to see what type of video card it takes (some are PCI express, some older ones are AGP, some PCs in small cases can only fit "low profile" PCI cards and some new ones will take PCI Express 2.0). Look at the power supply you have and write down what wattage it is. Some video cards require more watts than what most computers come with. You'll have to upgrade the power supply if the card requires more watts. What processor do you have? Write it down and get cards that require processors "lower" in capability than the one you have. Otherwise, the processor will be the bottleneck and you won't see the full benefit of the video card. How much RAM do you have? If you don't have at least 512 MB of RAM on the motherboard, most newer video cards wont work right. 1GB or 2GB of RAM is best for game
OnlineSimRacer said
on 9/23/2008 It always good have carnal knowledge of what you are doing especially when it comes to computers and often hardware and software. Thanks for your comments though I appreciate it!!