My journey with discrete graphic cards

 Picture taken from Gigabyte.my

For PC gamers all over the world, one of the most important components of their gaming rig would be their graphic card. This is the component that is tasked to crunch the numbers and convert them into images that can be displayed using a monitor. If the card is powerful enough, it allows the gamer to increase the graphics details to make the game look better (more eye candy).

A discrete graphics card is an add-on card that is attached to the motherboard, as opposed to an integrated graphics controller you get on most low-medium end motherboards.

My first taste of better graphics came in the form of a Voodoo 2 that I bought along with my PC while I was still in university. Lets see if I can recall the graphic cards that I have used so far:

• Voodoo 2 (lets start with this 16 MB of RAM goodness).
• Nvidia Geforce 4 MX 440 (a whopping 64MB RAM, or was it 32?).
• Nvidia Geforce 6800GS (256MB RAM).
• Nvidia Geforce 6800GS in SLI mode (I think I cooked these cards to death in my poorly ventilated casing).
• Nvidia GeForce 7200 as a stopgap measure because both the 6800s were unstable.
• ATI Radeon HD3850 (512MB RAM) from another friend trying to clear off stuff.
• and lastly, I am currently using an Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 (1GB RAM).

So far, the GTX 560 from Gigabyte ( the one pictured above is the Ti version, mine is non-Ti) has been a dream to play with, most of the games can be set to maximum detail and are still very much playable (on a 1680 x 1050 pixels monitor). According to reviews, this card can go up to full HD (1920x1080) for gaming and it can still be more than capable of serving most gamers, but I don't have a monitor that is large enough to do that kind of testing.

Lets see how long this will last me.

If only Diablo 3 came out sooner grrrr....