What To Check Before You Buy Your Gaming Graphics Card

by Liz Seyi Digital marketing manager

Any serious gamer knows that the graphics card is the most integral part of a gaming PC. A quality graphics card is the difference between high and low performance for any game.

Here at UBER PC, you can find every kind of Gaming Graphics Card to cater to all of our customers' needs, from basic models for casual use, right through to high-end cards for high FPS, high definition gaming to give you the advantage online.

So, here are just some of the things that you need to think about when you come to buy.

Compatibility

This factor is vital for those who are building their own custom PC, and can certainly spell disaster if you don't check. Certain brands of graphics card won't be compatible with certain kinds of motherboard, which could leave you with a very expensive card sitting dormant, contributing nothing to your gaming experience.

The card might not even fit in the tower if you've chosen a very bulky model. You should therefore double-check all of the requirements for your graphics card, such as PCIe inputs and the amount of power it requires.

Cooling power

Graphics cards need cooling systems to prevent them from overheating and malfunctioning when you're running graphics-intensive games on your PC.

There are two distinct types of graphics card coolers: reference and non-reference. Reference refers to gaming graphics cards that are completely unmodified from what the manufacturer has shipped, whereas non-reference cards include modifications from third parties.

Manufacturers often ship cards with single cooling fans, which usually work great for keeping your PC cool even while running high-spec games. Modified non-reference double-fanned graphics cards might provide better cooling, but are generally a lot more temperamental than reference types.

If you are unsure as to whether reference or non-reference cooling is the best choice for your gaming PC, we would suggest that you monitor your CPU's temperature while you are gaming. If it reaches as high as 55 degrees Celsius, we would recommend a reference cooler, as this will normally have a single fan offset to one side to ensure that hot air is blown out the back of your computer case.

However, it may be that your computer already has a solid cooling system, in which case, an aftermarket non-reference cooler will be quieter while still boosting your graphics. It is non-reference systems that tend to incorporate two mounted fans that blow hot air directly away from the graphics card and into the computer case.

However, if you wish to extract the maximum performance potential from your gaming PC and are worried about overclocking (running your computer's processor at a higher speed than the manufacturer intended it to go), it may be water cooling, rather than air cooling, that is the best choice.

Watercooling can increase the performance of the GPU or CPU, due to the fact that stock air cooling can sometimes reach 80-100 degrees in constant gaming use, whereas watercooling can lower this to 30-40 degrees. This, in turn, enables the hardware to perform better, because once it reaches 100 degrees, it will do something called 'thermal throttling', whereby it lowers its performance to protect its components from damage.

On the other hand, watercooling is much more difficult to set up and often requires more expensive maintenance than air cooling, so you should think carefully about whether it is truly needed for your own machine.

RAM

You'll probably already have certain games in mind when investing in a new graphics card, so you will want to accommodate the system recommendations for the games you intend to play.

The RAM that your graphics card has defines how much memory it can exclusively work with. The system RAM of your PC does not contribute to the graphics and instead goes towards other operations.

The more dedicated RAM your card has, the greater the performance you'll get and the smoother the graphics will look. You should also consider the type of RAM that the card possesses. DDR3 and DDR4 type RAM provides gaming PCs with high-performance computation, but has recently been superseded by GDDR5 RAM, which has more memory bandwidth.

The type of RAM you go with is dependent on your budget. UBER PC has graphics cards that utilise both types of RAM to work with all customers' budgets. Feel free to get in touch with a member of the UBER PC team, who will be able to advise you on the best graphics card for your gaming PC and assist you with the buying process.

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Created on Dec 31st 1969 18:00. Viewed 0 times.

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