Gaming How to pick a graphics card, and install it?

[Foxi4]

I only put Ghz in the example to emphasise the point. What's actually important in CPUs is IPS (Instructions per Second, iirc) which is a truer measure of processing strength (e.g. comparing the IPS of Pentium D and Sandy Bridge Core i5 shows a huge improvement... the same can be seen with Intel over AMD). Ghz do matter, but not as much as marketing makes you think. For graphics cards, I think it was FLOPS that matter (I remember seeing the 4870X2 advertised for having 1.6 teraFLOPS or something).

Also, there ARE games that run better on quad core (and I think there were some that can actually make use of hexacore or HyperThreading) but they are still rare.

Agreed on both, but lately not only the MIPS values count for CPU's - as you said yourself, the maths behind games and applications got a little bit more complex throughout the years and floating point operations are especially important, so it's worth to actually consider both.

There are CPU's out there that deal with alot of standard instructions per second but just happen to be sloppy with Floating Point operations which causes slow-downs whenever they cannot be (for whatever reason) assigned to the GPU which would usually deal with them as it's designed for it.

 

[Zetta_x]

You are going to need a new case because the ventilation in that case sucks so bad it will not be enough to keep your system cool. You will also need a new case to fit the graphics card. You will have to buy a better power supply as your powersupply will explode if you try using that. You can say goodbye to your card reader as that's probably propriety built for that case. By this time you will be magically compulsed to buy a new motherboard since you are enjoying putting things together. You will forget that your new motherboard is not compatible with your old processor or memory and so you will be forced to give in to buying those. You plug in the power, reset, HDD indicators into a USB plug. You then realize you don't have any thermal paste and you question why your computer keeps turning off. You question why your monitor has a hole in it, you slowly lose all your hair and you feel right down to the molecule hair falling out.

You try putting back together your old computer but forget how because of pegatron's crappy motherboard manual not being displayed. You don't have a computer to look it up because quite frankly it's in a million pieces. For everything else there is mastercard.

 

[Originality]

And then you wake up finding it was all a bad dream because you have the delightful members of gbatemp to guide you through every step of the way.