Interface Cards & Controllers

Selecting a Video Card for Your Custom Built Computer

Many people that build their own computers do so for several different reasons. Primarily, they do it because they find it interesting, fun, and challenging. Another major benefit, however, is the ability to customize your PC to your specific needs.

A good number of people that build their own computers do so with gaming specifically in mind. The purpose of the new machine is important to know before you start out, because it will directly affect which components you select for the new system. For gaming computers, the single most important component is the video card.

Choosing the right card is very important, and can be a difficult decision. Though there are only two companies that produce Graphics Processing Units (GPUs,) there are literally thousands of video cards on the market. They vary wildly in both price and functionality, so the challenge is getting the best performance without wasting any money.

Why the Video Card is Important

Most computer games today rely on high-detail 3D graphics, large textures, heavy effects, and fast action. All of these features are very processor-intensive, and can slow down even the fastest system. This is where the GPU comes in.

A dedicated video card is able to offload the processing of 3D effects and rendering to the GPU, a dedicated piece of hardware optimized specifically for carrying out these kinds of instructions. The GPU is much more efficient than a Central Processing Unit (CPU) at calculating geometry and storing/loading textures. This makes performance in games much better and faster, as it also frees up CPU cycles to work on other things.

Connecting Your Video Card

For nearly the past two decades, there has been the question of what type of connector to select for connecting the card to your motherboard. In the 90's and early 2000's, motherboards often featured two different types of expansion slot connectors, AGP and PCI. AGP was the preferred connector for graphics, and motherboards almost exclusively offered only one AGP slot.

During the mid-2000's sometime, the PCI-e bus was developed, which offered four times the bandwidth of the AGP bus. At this point, standard PCI video cards were rendered obsolete, and the question became, "which slot type does your board feature, AGP or PCI-e?"

At the time of this writing, new developments have led to the PCI-e 2.0 bus, which now remains the uncontested standard for video cards. AGP is essentially deprecated, and though board still feature PCI slots, they exist only for connecting legacy devices.

The GPU: ATI or nVidia

As stated before, there are only two companies that produce mainstream video card GPUs: ATI and nVidia. These two companies, however, do not sell video cards directly. They sell the GPUs and architecture to third parties that then manufacture video cards to sell to the consumer. So essentially, you not only have to select a GPU company, but also a company that builds video cards. You should research specific video card manufacturers for yourself, but some notable quality builders are EVGA, XFX, and GIGABYTE.

With the GPU, there is really no clear-cut superior company. There are many that swear by nVidia, and others that claim they will only use ATI GPUs. Each company has its ups and downs, but their offerings, in terms of quality and features, are almost always very comparable. Research each GPU extensively and determine which offers specific features that suit your needs. If either of them seems sufficient, make your decision based on price.

When comparing video cards, be sure to take into account the GPU generation. GPUs are released in generations about once, sometimes twice per year, and are usually numbered incrementally. Typically a generation model number will be something like "GS 500 series" with individual card models looking something like, "GS 560," and, "GS 570." Higher numbers almost universally represent a newer or more advanced GPU, but each company follows their own model naming scheme, so make sure you understand the GPU naming scheme before drawing your conclusions.

SLI and Crossfire

Both nVidia SLI and ATI Crossfire are technologies that have been around for about five years, and accomplish pretty much identical goals. Both SLI and Crossfire allow you to connect multiple video cards (sometimes up to four) together to split processing load between GPUs and improve performance.

In order to run SLI/Crossfire, you must have two identical video cards that support operating in these modes, as well as a motherboard that supports them. SLI/Crossfire can be a great way to improve gaming performance, but also increases the cost of your system substantially, so you will have to decide if the performance gains are worth it to you.

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M. Holland
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USB 3.0 Will Speed Up Data Transfer

USB 3 is now out on the street. Given that USB connections to external hard disk drives for backup are pretty common, this gives you a significant improvement in speeding up the transfer. However as usual, you will discover a couple of caveats for being on the leading edge of technology. The USB 3 appeared to be a major hit in the CES exhibit in January of this year.

USB 2 has a speed rating of 480 mBits/s, which means about 57 megabytes per second. But those tend to be mystical numbers since most users are fortunate to get 25 megabytes per second and even that may be based mostly on file size. The brand new USB 3 is rated at 4.8 Gbit/s or 570 megabytes a second but that too is way past the genuine speeds we obtained through testing. Yet again it’s rather dependent on file size and type but we did manage to hit 58 megabytes a second in a number of tests.

So within the real world our testing exhibited at least a doubling of speed and frequently half the time period to copy the very same amount of data. In some instances in which there were lots of bigger files (1 GB or above) we did get bursts of above 80 megabytes a second however that was the exception to the average copy rate. Nevertheless I’ll take a 50% increase in speed and typically a third of the time frame to copy files any day of the week.

Moving around large and dense files such as graphics or music will get a pretty major enhancement. Video cameras and music equipment will receive a big enhancement in moving data files to a computer. Server class machines and big workstations designed for AutoCad, video editing, and music will undoubtedly get a significant increase from the brand new USB 3 speeds.

Transferring my own music collection around has usually been a significant pain. I have above 55 GBs of music and waiting for it to backup is intolerable. Or accomplishing a total fresh back up of my principal workstation with more than 120 GBs can be about as much fun as watching paint dry. In evaluating the brand new USB 3 I received a big improvement over both tasks and lowered the time well over two thirds which is really a great improvement.

Now for the not so good news regarding USB 3: they changed the connector part that goes towards the device and so all your current USB 2 devices will by no means see the brand new speeds. And as far as I could discover at the moment, you can find only a handful of flash drives and external hard drives that are completely USB 3 compliant. And this also indicates you’ll need the brand new USB 3 cable to be connected with just about any new device.

One difficulty with current and older motherboards is that they may possibly be limited by their particular bus interface data transfer rates. The PCI Generation 1.0 is limited to 2.5 GB transfer rate so it won't make any difference how fast any connection is above that limit. And the new norm for USB 3 is a bare minimum of a 5 GB transfer rate to be certified. You'll see an boost in rate but in no way obtain the highest transfer rate with these older types.

And you will not notice USB 3 supplied in many new computer systems yet. You'll find a couple of forward thinking firms like Startech who offer a PCI board having USB 3 connections for around $50. And some personal computer businesses are gradually adding USB 3 to their latest computer versions. This is notably important for laptop computer users considering that the sole way now to upgrade is to use a media card adapter.

Both HP and Fujitsu proclaimed that they will be offering USB 3 on their brand new laptop computer systems. Western Digital was the earliest out of the gate with a new version of My Book 3.0 external hard drive that also is available with a USB 3 PCI adapter in a package deal. Seagate has mentioned it'll present similar external hard drives by middle of the summer 2010. And flash drive producer Super Talent is offering a 16 GB flash drive that is USB 3 compliant.

So if you desire to speed up your file and computer data transfers, USB 3 will definitely offer some real world improvements in transfer speed. And when the new computer systems catch up and offer you USB 3, and all the device producers get the new USB 3 compliant models inside the supply line, it'll rapidly become the newest standard.

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Will a card that has a PCI-Express X1 connector work if I put it in a PCI slot?

I want to put Asus Xonar DX 7.1 in my computer but the only PCI-Express slot it has is taken. So I was wondering if I could put it in the PCI slot an it'll still work.

An old-style PCI slot? Nope.

You CAN waste a full-length PCI-Express x16 slot on a short x1 card... it will work but just won't occupy the full slot. But old-style PCI is a completely different interface, the card wouldn't even line up with that slot.

http://www.playtool.com/pages/vidslots/mballslots.jpg

You need to find a PCI version of the sound card instead of the PCI-E x1 version.

Digidesign Pro Tools HD PCIe cards & PCI-express Expansion