How to Buy a Video Card

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chris Bryce with superservice.com. Here's how to buy a video card. The best way to go about buying a video card is to first, look at your needs. The main thing to realize is that there's several different types of connectors for the video cards. Inside your computer, there's three main types of bus connectors that would accommodate that video card. The first is PCI. Now that's an older technology but there are some computers still that have PCI slots. This is not to be confused with the newest technology which is called PCI Express or PCIE. If you're going to get a PCI video card and you pickup the PCIE instead, it will not fit in your computer. In the same token, if you go to buy a PCIE video card and you end up with a PCI, that won't fit either. So you need to make sure that when you're looking at your computer specifications that you realize whether its PCI or PCIE. There's also a type of video card called AGP. Now AGP video cards are being phased out as well but you still can pick them up and some computers still have that AGP video card slot. The main thing to realize on those is the actual speed of the video card. There's AGP 1x, 2x, 4x and 8x and those are all the speeds of the bus itself on the video card. If you go to pickup an AGP video card and you have a 4x slot, you can still go out and buy an 8x AGP video but just keep in mind that its going to run a little bit slower because its running in an old slot. This is important if you're looking at graphic editing, video editing, graphic design, anything like that, because you want to make sure that if you go out and buy that video card all based on the speed factor of it and then you put it in an older machine, its going to run slower so you're not getting the full benefit out of it. If your machine's a new machine, you're probably going to end up with a PCI Express in which case the only thing you're looking for is the amount of memory that is on the card, which is going to be dependent on if you are doing any kind of editing at all. The minimum I would suggest today is 256 megabytes for a video card if you're going to be adding it to your computer. If you're doing any type of video editing though, I would look at the 512 megabyte or even some of the newer 1 gigabyte memory video cards to make sure that you're really getting the full processing speed out of them. And that's how you buy a video card."