Hello and welcome to another free computer tutorial. This time you’re looking at Lesson 9: Video Cards. So, there is a couple of main differences in video cards, obviously the onboard memory, the performance so you can get an everyday video card and things that do everyday things. That’s fine. You’ve got gaming computer cards, and you’ve got middle‑of‑the‑road cards.

As far as functions, you’ve also got onboard video cards, which comes in most computers out there. Onboard is vastly better than it used to be. It used to be absolute junk, but now you can actually get some pretty nice cards onboard with your computer. You’ve also got standalone video cards and multiple video cards, SLI mode.

To give you a look at what an onboard video card would look like, I put here together a picture of a typical motherboard. This is the back‑view of it and you’ve got your keyboard ports here, you’ve got your serial port and your parallel port for your printer, USB and then you’ve got your network card here, and then your onboard sound. Right here you’ve got your onboard video card. So if you’re looking at your computer at home, this is what an onboard video card would like.

You can have both an onboard and a stand‑alone card. So, it’s also important to remember that. Standalone cards have higher performance. They’ve got more room, basically, to have more memory and faster processors. While they’re typically thought of just for gaming, they’re not just for that. If you do things like CAD, or you use drawing tools, things like Photoshop or generally, you’re a casual gamer, it’s probably worth having a standalone video card.

Some of them are pretty complex, where they have their own power cord, so they can handle extremely complex video games. On the back of this card you’ve got a DVI out, S‑Video out, and then your standard VGA. This is what a standard monitor would plug into as VGA.

DVI is a little bit nicer, digital video. Another setup you might see is multiple video cards. This is the third, and probably the most rare. As we talk about in a lot of our lessons, in the 80:20 rule kind of thing, this is maybe 20 percent or even 10 percent of the population have a setup like this. And this is somebody who does exclusively CAD or drawing; or exclusively computer gaming.

So you can see these cards are extremely large. Somewhat of a monstrosity with this little motherboard but that’s the case. They also have their own power‑cords and they typically require a much, much higher rate of power supply, something that is able to give a lot more juice because these babies require a lot of juice. So as you can see, they have giant fans, giant heat sinks, a wide variety of things.

So, that’s a little overview of video cards. Hopefully this helps you understand a little bit more about them. Basically, what they do, a lot like the sound card, is they help convert the code and what’s going on outside your computer to a display outside your computer. So that’s the interface.

This lesson is more about giving you good introduction of video cards, and setups to keep an eye out for, whether you’re repairing them or you want to consider a setup of your own.

Installing them is also rather easy. Assuming your computer meets all the minimum requirements, it’s about as simple to install as the sound card, where you just install the software, and shut off your computer, put in the video card, and turn it back on.

Now remember, if you lose an onboard video card, you can’t replace it. You’re going to have to buy a standalone one to replace that. That’s one drawback. But if you’re stand‑alone video card died, you’d have to replace that, too. So, it’s kind of hors de prix [?]

So I hope that this lesson helped to get you warmed up a little bit about video cards. And if you have any questions, of course, always email them to support@beyourownit.com.

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