Can someone explain the difference between a GeForce card and a Radeon one.
Which is better ?
Is (for example) an X3100 better than an 8600 M GS ?
Or is it more a matter of memory ? surely 512 is better than 256, no ?
GeForce = company called nvidia
radeon = company called ATI
As a rule of thumb more memory = better graphics card. I have leavn't to my cost how much a good grpahics card helps out in the general performance of a windows XP system. If you are going to be playing high end games let me knwo but otherwie get the best one you can afford. My preference is for Nvidia since they work with linux (Fedora, Ubuntu etc) very well.
Hope this helps,
Woppa
Thanks woppa30.
How much memory is 'standard' these days ?
I guess high end games = high end cards = high end prices.
If you have "newish" hardware then you will be looking at a PCI-e card. if its older and AGP card and older still a PCI. Don't worry about the terminology, just different shaped slots, there is more to it than that but not worth worrying about at the moment.
For PCI-e 256Mb will probably be the minimum. These however come in various "grades" a bit like a BMW, you can stick a 2Ltr engine (=256Mb) in different cars and get a different ride. Basically the higher the series (6xxx vs 7xxx vs 8xxx) the better it is, and you guessed it more expensive. These go up to 1Gb and if you have the right hardware you can actually have two cards and "twin" them to work together. This however can cost more than a standrad PC...
AGP cards, because they are older, are now much the muchness. Get the best one you can afford which will probably be a 2565Mb card.
PCI, same as above really, these are very cheap because they are older technology and don't come with as much memory or speed.
If that made sense I hope it helps, if you can tell us specifically what PC you want to buy a graphics card for we can have a look at options / budget etc....
Best wishes,
Woppa
recently purchased a new ATI radeon card from ebay for about 25 quid. Its a 512mb card but if you have 2gb of onboard ram it will use some of that power and become a 1gb graphics card.
Best purchase i ever made for gaming and watching streams.
To establish which type of graphic card you need the easiest way is probably to use Aida to identify your motherboard.
You can download a free copy of Aida from:
http://majorgeeks.com/download181.html
Unzip the file & click on aida32.exe to start the program & go to Motherboard/Motherboard
You will see the motherboard name there let us know what it is & we can look it up & check which type of card you need.
High end doesn't always mean high prices unless you need specific features only available on certain cards. You just need to shop around, for example there is a very popular 512mb Nvidia PCIe graphics card on ebuyer for £32.47 which is just a few quid more than a lot of the 256mb cards.
http://www.ebuyer.com/product/126986
This card is not SLi capable so won't be suitable for certain games though.