Not long ago, there were many graphics chip manufacturers to choose from. But nowadays you have basically two options - Nvidia and ATi. Our recent showdown between the two provided a comprehensive guide to all the available GPUs. But if you're not a gamer, any of them will be perfectly sufficient. In fact, buying a motherboard with graphics built in will fit the bill just fine as well. This is why Intel, which only makes integrated graphics at the moment, is in fact the largest player in the graphics-chip business.
But if you do want to play games, the battle between Nvidia and ATi has kept development rapid. Many gaming enthusiasts change their graphics every year, or even every six months. After the release of the GeForce 8000 series, Nvidia had the performance high ground, and ATi wasn't able to wrest it back with its Radeon HD 2000 series. However, the Radeon HD 3000 series is putting up more of a fight. The latest dual-GPU ATi Radeon HD 3870 X2 was the fastest graphics card available in many benchmarks until Nvidia brought its own dual-GPU option to market, the GeForce 9800 GX2.
However, both of these are among the most power-hungry cards on the market. And at £220 for the 3870 X2 and £360 for the 9800 GX2, they're also very pricey. The same applies to Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX and Ultra cards, which are based on Nvidia's first DirectX 10 chip, the G80. In contrast, the 512MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS uses the next-generation GPU, which is also to be found in Nvidia's latest GeForce 9000 series. So although the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS isn't the fastest card around, at well under £200 it's by far the best value at the higher end of the scale. This is what we chose for our gaming PC.
With this system's Intel X38 chipset and twin PCI Express slots 16x, choosing the ATi Radeon HD 3870 X2 would have allowed us to add a second for a CrossFire dual-card setup. There has been a huge marketing campaign surrounding running multiple graphics cards in parallel. First, Nvidia's SLI and then ATi's CrossFire promised enhanced performance with dual-card configurations. Now both manufacturers are offering three-card versions, with more slated for the future. And if you follow graphics roadmaps, multi-core will be the future of graphics in general, just as it has already become for CPUs. But looking at statistics, multi-graphics is still a bit of a white elephant. Lots of people buy motherboards to have the option, but according to a survey conducted by Valve, makers of Half-Life 2, only around 1% of users actually run either SLI or CrossFire.
Another issue to consider is just how much power the fastest current graphics cards consume. Powerful GPUs are now the most watt-hungry components in your system, and the major reason why power supplies rated at over a kilowatt have become necessary. With some models consuming in excess of 200W, such as ATi's Radeon HD 2900 XT, running a dual-graphics configuration would max out a standard 450W PSU on its own. The latest generation of cards from ATi and Nvidia have reduced this to more manageable levels, but power consumption remains another reason why running a single card makes much more sense in a PC that isn't entirely focused on gaming.
For our budget PC, we could get away without a graphics card at all: if you're not a gamer, the ASRock motherboard's GeForce 7 series graphics will be perfectly sufficient, and would make our total system cost just £205. But we've added Palit's Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT just in case. This is the most expensive component in the entire system, but with 512MB of memory and DirectX 10 support you would even be able to play Crysis at impressive Medium settings at 1,280 x 1,024 - on a PC costing less than £300 to build.
The needs of our silent PC are a little different. With the massive power consumption of high-end graphics cards, their cooling requirements can be very hefty indeed, and the necessary fans small and whiny. So we've opted for the fastest passively cooled graphics card currently on the market, MSI's Nvidia Fanless 8500 GT 256MB. This won't be quick enough for the very latest games, but will be sufficient for recent titles - and entirely silent.
Next: Cases and power suppliesBuild a future-proof PC... for £200Author: James Morris
Graphics cards