Most all graphics cards are based on an Nvidia or ATI Radeon chip set. For the casual home or office user, any of today's video cards are adequate. If you're just doing Excel spreadsheets you might not need to spend $500 on a video card, but if you have a 21? monitor and want to view that spreadsheet at 1600 x 1200 with a high refresh rate, it may be worth the investment. Where things start to change is on high end games, that's where the Geforce and Radeon cards make the difference.

Memory Matters

As with every other facet of computing, more is always better. However, you don't need a 256MB card if you're just going to be using Quickbooks. For most office applications, a 32 or 64MB card is adequate. For gamers or those doing some sort of video production work, a minimum of 128MB is recommended, with a strong lean to 256. The more memory your video card has, the higher the resolution, and the larger the number of colors it can display.

Connectors and Interfaces

A standard SVGA card is going to have a single VGA connector. Higher end cards will have an S-Video and a DVI connector as well. What this means is that you have to pay attention to what type of monitor you have. DVI is all digital, like HDTV. The S-Video can be used to output to your TV for gaming on a larger screen.

Now a days, you will have either a PCI or an AGP slot for your video card. AGP stands for Advanced Graphics Port and as you might have guessed, means there are enhancements in performance when using and AGP slot. If your current video card is built into the motherboard, it is likely robbing the system of valuable memory because the system RAM is shared with it. This is another good reason to upgrade your video card.

John Gibb manages The site dedicated to computers and printers.