Video card, how to choose?

A video card is a part of a computer whose tasks consist in converting signals in the processor into a video signal that is fed to a monitor or TV screen.

What firm to take? To date, only 2 companies on the market who are chasing each other in performance, quality and price, are AMD and Nvidia. The difference between these firms is in price. Cards from Nvidia are more expensive than AMD. Why is that? Many people say that AMD has more problems, something may not start, it's not working correctly. Personally, I used both Nvidia and AMD, I did not notice the difference. If the hands grow out of the right place, there will be no problems. In addition, cards of the same performance can be with a significant difference in price. And sometimes an AMD card can cost less than a weaker analog from Nvidia for the same price. Personally, I prefer AMD. I'm satisfied with everything, I've never had any problems, I'm paying less for the same performance as Nvidia, although I have nothing against the latter, the quality of the cards is on the high. Besides reference cards (cards manufactured by the video chip manufacturer), there are other companies that compile video cards . For example, firms such as: MSI, Gigabyte, HIS, Palit, Zotac, Sapphire. All of them are distinguished by the fact that they put their cooling systems on video cards, and already based on the quality of cooling they overclock the chip frequencies. Therefore, as a rule, cards from such collectors are sold at higher frequencies, which is better for performance. The choice of a manufacturer often depends on the buyer's own preferences and needs.

So, with the firm have decided what's next? Then we look at the amount of memory on the board of the video card. 80% of all computer users believe that the more memory on board, the more powerful the video card. Alas, this is far from the case, where this opinion came from, it is not clear. A large amount of video memory is certainly good, but this is not a factor determining the power. If you have a large monitor, with a resolution of 1920x1200 and above, it is desirable that there would be more memory, 2-3GB. The memory of the video card stores textures, objects. Therefore, the larger the screen resolution, the more textures and objects need to be stored and processed in memory. The type of memory varies from DDR to DDR5. What's remarkable, DDR5 memory reads the information up to 20% faster and transfers it to a graphics chip than DDR4. The power depends on the video chip itself, which is used in the video card. New cards are constantly coming out, with new chips, a new process, new frequencies. The power depends on it. Even if the two cards have the same memory and core frequencies, it is not necessary that they have the same power, again, depends on the video chip.

Pay attention to the width of the memory bus. As a rule, it is measured in bits (128, 320, 512bit). The higher the value, the faster the data exchange with the central processor and video chip. Fans of games, very often install themselves two video cards in SLI or CrossFire, depending on the manufacturer, Nvidia and AMD, respectively. When installing two cards, the performance increases by about 1.5 times. For such a system, a powerful power supply and a cooling system are needed . Typically, such systems use liquid cooling or liquid nitrogen cooling . But this is a separate story.