MDofPC - How to Upgrade Your Graphics Card

Ten years ago there were several graphics chipset manufacturers and a similar number of companies focusing on building cards based on one or other of these. However, there has been tremendous consolidation in this area of the PC industry in the last decade, and today there isn't a high-tech heavyweight fight on the planet as competitive as that in the PC graphics arena, with ATI and NVIDIA slugging it out for market share. Of the other graphics chip-makers who were around in the early 1990s, only Matrox has managed to survive.

NVIDIA came to the fore in the late 1990s, benefiting from rivals' unsuccessful attempts to broaden their businesses via acquisition. By staying focused on what they did best - designing graphics chips - they were able to ramp up their designs to the point where they were able to achieve a six-monthly product cycle. The competition simply couldn't keep up and the acquisition of erstwhile rival 3DFX in late 2000 appeared to cement the company's position of dominance.

Canadian-based ATI has been in the graphics business for close on twenty years, growing from a seven person operation in 1985 to a huge multinational corporation by 2001. The company has built its business by supplying cost-effective graphics chips to OEM computer makers worldwide. It made a huge mistake in the summer of 2000 when it disclosed plans for Apple to include its chips in a number of forthcoming products before Steve Jobs was to do likewise in a keynote speech. Apple were not best pleased and soon after the systems in question were unveiled, with NVIDIA graphics sub-systems! The faux pas was estimated to have cost ATI millions of dollars.

However, the company managed to survive the incident and surprised everyone in 2002 when it succeeded in wresting the 3D speed crown from NVIDIA for a time with it's Radeon 9700 chip.

Reasons for upgrading

There are an number of reasons why you may wish to upgrade your graphics card:

problems with your current card
better performance
to drive a digital screen
to support dual screens.

In truth the performance of graphics cards has been more than adequate for office-type applications for several years now. Performance has only been an issue for users who're into multimedia applications - such as video editing. What's really driven graphics technology in recent years though is the phenomena of 3D gaming.

That's not to say that 2D users have no reason to upgrade though. With LCD monitors having finally fallen to an affordable price level, many conventional business users are finding themselves in the market for a graphics card upgrade, just so as to enable them to swap their bulky, hot, power-hungry and potentially eyestrain-inducing CRT monitor for a more ergonomic and less health-hazardous flat panel screen.

If you're planning on replacing your integrated video with a separate add-in graphics card, the first thing to do is cross your fingers, because it may not be possible. Motherboards with integrated video are notoriously difficult to upgrade. Indeed, what you're often getting when you buy a motherboard with integrated video is a cheap, compact solution that's not designed to be upgradeable.

If your luck's in then your motherboard User Guide will have instructions on how to disable the integrated video, either via a small switch or jumper or by disabling it in the system's BIOS.

After you've installed your add-in graphics card, you should also check in Device Manager for the presence of two display adapters. If you have delete the one one that refers to your integrated graphics ......... and cross your fingers again!