Display Card: From Rs 400 to Rs 40,000

While CPU horsepower gets the most emphasis in any buying decision, the video card plays an equal if not more important role in deciding how good games, movies or even the windows desktop will look on your computer. And while CPUs have pretty much reached a saturation where one experiences little or no difference to most applications after an upgrade, video-card technology is still moving forward by leaps and bounds. So how does one decide on which card to buy?

Display cards can be had for anything from Rs 400 to Rs 40,000. Choose a card depending on your usage. If you are a hardcore gamer, and have the money to spend, then nothing less than a GeForce2 will serve your needs. On the other hand, if you mostly do productivity work like work in Office or surf the Internet, then you have little need for an expensive GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Mostly, however, your usage will lie somewhere between these two extremes.

First, decide what you want from your video card. Do you want to work at resolutions greater than 1024X768? Does the difference between 16 and 32 bit colors matter? Does your monitor support very high refresh rates? These are all functions of a video card that are usually included in the specifications. Next, do you use 3D applications extensively? Most modern-day games require a high-end video card. If your work is going to be mostly 2D related, look for features like antialiasing. The other things to keep in mind are: the amount of memory it has (16 MB is minimum, 32 MB is the norm), memory/core frequency, video in/out, dual-monitor support and software

bundle.