Video cards allow you to see more, the higher the resolution, the more colors,
the better the display. As with sound, quality
equals money.
One thing you may want to consider - upgrading one will affect the other. If you
upgrade your monitor and the video card doesn't have the power to drive the
monitor then you will have a nice shiny new monitor that has low resolution. So
it is a kind of catch 22.
One way to go about this is upgrade what you can afford, if you can only afford
one thing at a time upgrade the video card first. The reason I say this is that
you can always use a lower resolution on your monitor until you can afford to
buy a new monitor.
Another reason for going for the video card first is they are the bottle neck
for the computer, if you don't have enough memory on the video card when the
processor sends data to the video card it has to hold back some of the data
until the first batch of data has been sent to the monitor. Maybe you have a
word processor open, you are working on a document and decide you want to put a
graphic in the document to illustrate a point, when you select the graphic and
load it you see it slowly fill in the blank space in the document. The video
card can not accept the data fast enough to display it the way you expect it to.
Not enough ram, maybe it is one of the older video cards that doesn't have a
independent processor but only what is called a RAMDAC.
Before you get all excited and start you research you need to know what you have
in your computer now. The computer management / device manager will tell you the
make and model but not the type. The type is the slot in the computer that the
card is inserted. Over four years old main boards can use ether PCI or APG,
newer systems may only take the PCI Express (PCI-X). If you don't know you will
have to open up your computer and check the current video card. If you do open
the case up remember ESD will kill anything you touch if you are not grounded.
So you have decided on a new card and monitor - which one? Well what do you want
the video system do? High graphics output? Games, rendering MPEG movies?
Watching TV online? Higher resolution when you surf those flashy web sites?
Check out the cards that have a processor and ram over 256 meg.
Video ram is
different from the ram for your main board and it is more expensive. You should
be able to find a high quality video card for around $200 with a processor and
256 meg or more of ram.
Note:
Be aware that the newer PCI-X cards will share or
attempt to share the system memory, if you upgrade to a card that has say 128Mb
of ram and run extensive graphics programs the video card will use system memory
to offset the lack of memory on the card. If this is the case you will need to
increase the ram on the system board to compensate this sharing of the system
memory.
Monitors - Well just about everyone makes 'em. Research will help. The main
thing is the resolution, like the video card. You can find a types from CRT
(Cathode Ray Tube) to Plasma flat screens. Flat screens take up less room and use less
power.
