Buyers Guide on Graphics Cards

Buyers Guide on Graphics Cards

Graphics cards come in all sorts of shapes and sizes but what should you really lookout for when choosing your graphics card? The first thing you should be asking yourself before getting into this guide is, what do you expect to get out of a graphics card? General viewing, multimedia, 3D editing or gaming? There are Graphics cards catered to all of these with the price getting higher the more resource hungry the process.

Type/Model Number

Maybe the most obvious thing to lookout for in a graphics card is the Model Number. AMD and NVidia both sell cards competitively each has both pros and cons to the Graphics cards they design. While Nvidia GTX and AMD Radeon are Gaming Cards on the other hand we have AMD FirePro and Nvidia Quadro which are both workstation cards for tasks like animation and design.

When both companies release a new line of GPUs the model numbers reflect the power of the card. E.g. Nvidia has there GTX10** series line (GTX1050, 1050TI, 1060, 1070, 1080) 1050 being the least powerful and 1080TI being the most.

Dedicated Memory

Dedicated Graphics cards have their own dedicated memory unlike onboard Graphics cards which uses your CPU and system RAM. The higher model the graphics card the more dedicated memory it will have to handle more resource hungry games/Tasks. Make sure to check the requirements of what you will be running and more.

Power consumption

Always check you have enough power to run the GPU, check the manufacturer’s minimum power supply and make sure your computer is equipped adequately.