Upgrade Your Video Card

- See Episode 43: Upgrade Your Power Supply if you decide to upgrade your video card to ensure power requirements.


- Check to see if you have a intergrated motherboard graphics [AKA on-board] or not.

- Integrated video is common in value-priced computer systems.
 •   Shares system memory [AKA RAM]
 •   Not as compatible with certain graphic requirements.

- If your adding a new video card and your system doesn't automatically shut off the integrated video, it can be shut off in the BIOS.

- See Episode 36: BIOS Basics if you need to disable your on-board graphics via the BIOS.


- If you have ISA on your motherboard just upgrade the whole computer system.
3 Types of Graphics Cards:
 •   PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect:


 •   PCIe - PCI Express:


 •   AGP - Accelearated Graphics Port:


 •   Display of all three types:


- 16x PCI Express moves data at up to 8 GB/sec. That's four times the maximum for AGP and sixty times faster than PCI's maximum.

- GPU: Graphics Processing Unit

- Physics cards are extreme gamers or high-end tweakers.

- ATI offers Crossfire, which is ATI's comparable technology to Nividia's SLI.

- Nvidia offers SLI which is shown in the photo below:

 •   SLI: Scalable Link Interface


- Crossfire and SLI both involve two identical PCIe graphic cards which are connected by a bridge.