How to Install a Video Card on a Computer

Video Transcript

"In the ever revolving world of computer gaming, one of the things you eventually going to have to do is upgrade our Video Card. Hi, I'm Charles Steward, Jr. and I'm going to tell you how to upgrade your computer's video card. First thing you want to do is make sure what or see what your computer can handle. This computer I built and I know what motherboard went into it. But let's, most people probably have a Dell or an HP, you're going to want to go to the manufacturer's website and go to the support section and look up the model no. of your computer and see if you even have a video card that can be upgraded. Sometimes, on the lower budget computers, they integrate the graphics into the motherboard itself. That means, there's no port for you to upgrade and you're just kind of stuck to what they gave you. However, they do offer some other ways around that if you have PCI slots, which pretty much all computers do. They make video cards with their PCI slot compatible. So, you can still go around it, depending on if you have a PCI Express, which is a newer technology than PCI, you can get faster graphics cards. As a matter of fact, most of the graphics cards today are a form of PCI Express. So first, you want to take off your case. Let's say, you can't find out, or you can't find it on the website, or it's a built computer and you're not sure, you're going to open up the case. So you just look on the back and unscrew your screws or sometimes there's a lever, you just push the button, it will come right off. But for this one, it has screw and for the sake of demonstration I've taken out all the screws. So you pop that off and we're going to look inside. And here, we can see this is the graphics card right here, you can also tell, on the back you'll see that these are the monitor inputs. Now, for this one I know it's an AGP Card, and that is an older technology. So if I was going to upgrade, I'd have to make sure whatever computer graphics card I was going to buy, was an AGP Card. 'Cause a lot of them nowadays are PCI Express and if I bought one of the newer cards and try to throw it in here, it won't work. So let's say, I got a new card, I'm going to have to take this one out and to put in my new one. Well first, you've got a screw right here that's mounting it, your card to the case. So you're going to come in and find a Phillip says, screwdriver and unscrew it from the case. Alright. Once your screws out, then it's pretty easy to do. Some slots over here, there's a little lever you have to pull out in order to pop your card out, it's a way to secure the card into the thing. Also, some of the newer cards are very power intensive so, there might be a place over here where your, where you've got a power cord attached from the power unit into the card to give it extra power. So you want to unplug pretty much everything from the card before you take it out. Okay, you just pull it out and then once it's out, you can see your slots available now. And then you just grab your graphics card and just for the sake of this demonstration, we'll put the old one back in, it should be exactly the same. So you're going to come in, again, make sure everything is clear, line it all up with the ports and then again, when you're putting it in, don't force anything. Give it a light push and if you feel that it's not going, then don't try to push it in 'cause you might break it and then obviously, the graphics cards are expensive. So you push it and then I hear a click because my port has a little tam and that's in there. And then I'll just take my screw to attach it back to the case and then once that's securely in there, it should be good to go and when you boot up the computer, you should notice that your new graphics card installed. Again, on a side note I didn't mention earlier, when you are handling any electronics, make sure that you ground yourself, by that, it mean, touch the case or wear your strap that attaches you to the case whenever you're handling anything like RAM or your graphics card because one transfer of a static discharge onto that card will destroy it. So you definitely want to make sure you don't destroy this, you know, new graphics card that you bought. And that's it for how to install a graphics card in your computer."