One of the easiest improvements you can make to your computer is to install a new expansion card. The phrase ‘expansion card’ refers to any of the specialized circuit boards that are inserted into slots in the motherboard. Some examples include graphics (or video) cards, sound (or audio) cards, network cards, and so forth.
There are a couple of reasons why you’d want to replace an existing card. One reason is that the card may have failed (if you keep your computer long enough, sooner or later, the components will fail).
More commonly, cards are replaced because the needs of the user have changed. For example, PC games have become very complex, with their 3-D effects, fluid motion, and so forth. Gaming enthusiasts need more powerful graphics cards to support the graphical demands of the gaming application. The memory demands of these games can be quite high as well, more than the system RAM can support by itself. Consequently, high-end video cards (also referred to as video adapters or display adapters) incorporate their own onboard memory.
A video card upgrade may also be in order if you plan on purchasing a super high-resolution monitor, or if you are looking to set up dual monitors. In either case, you must make sure that the video card you purchase supports these features.
There is a certain degree of interdependence between your monitor and your video card. For example, monitors are designed to be run at certain resolutions, and you need to make sure that your video card can support those resolutions.
As mentioned previously, the video card is just one type of ‘expansion card’ that is installed in your computer. Because it shares common features with other types of expansion cards, and also because it has a few unique peculiarities, we’re going to use the video card as the basis for our discussion on upgrading expansion cards.
The first step is to determine what type of slot is available on the motherboard. The three possibilities for video cards are PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect), AGP ( Accelerated Graphics Port), and PCI Express. The PCI slot has been around for awhile, but it cannot match the performance benefits of AGP and PCI Express (PCI-E). For backward-compatibility purposes, motherboards will continue to support PCI devices, but the PCI bus will eventually give way to PCI Express.
If your current video card is installed in a PCI slot, you should plan on upgrading to either an AGP or PCI-E video card, if supported by your motherboard. In fact, PCI-E slots come in a variety of ‘flavors’, the most common of which are 1x and 16x. Be sure to check your motherboard documentation before making your video card purchase.
Some of these cards can set you back upwards of $500 – good reason to make sure that you are static-protected when you install the new card. Even a small static discharge that you would not even feel can destroy that $500 video card.