When choosing a video card, it is important to know what you're going to be using it for.
The cheapest route is to find a Motherboard with one built into it. This is sufficient for most users. If you simply don't want one built into your Motherboard, or can't find one, pretty much any cheap video card will do for everyday use.
If you're into gaming, there are a lot of factors that make a video card "gaming" quality.
Memory - Video cards have memory (RAM) built onto the card that it uses for its calculations. This is the primary selling gimmick when it comes to most video cards, but simply having a ton of memory on the card won't make it fast, it also depends on what kind of memory it is, DDR currently being the best. Another factor in memory is how many bits it runs at, the higher the better.
Interface - The interface is the technology used on the card to connect it to the motherboard. The motherboard has to support the interface of the video card you're using, or it simply won't work. There are a lot of different types of interfaces now, from PCI, to AGP, PCI Express, and there are also different variations of AGP, like AGP 4x, AGP8x, etc. The AGP interfaces are usually backwards compatible, but they are not usually forward compatible, so you can put a 4x card into an 8x slot, but not vice versa. These are also never cross compatible, so you can not put a PCI Express card into a regular PCI slot, or into an AGP slot.
Interfaces also regulate how fast the card can be. PCI is the slowest, then AGP scaling up to the various versions of AGP, and the fastest currently being PCI Express, which is used on most of today's high end video cards.
Other factors that you might want to consider that don't necessarily have anything to do with speed:
Resolution - How large of a screen the video card can display on. If you have a very large screen, you'll want a card that can display in a larger resolution.
Outputs - The kinds of connectors that the video card has to connect to a monitor. VGA is the most common, but is also the lowest quality. A lot of monitors, especially LCD monitors, support DVI now, which is a higher quality output. Some also have S-Video outputs, or possibly one of each, or multiples, which brings us to whether or not it can support multiple displays.
Multiple Display Support - Regulates whether or not the card can display to multiple monitors at once. Some cards will have multiple connectors of a single types, others will have several different types, it just depends on the card. While most cards with multiples of the same type will most likely support multiple monitors, the ones with several different types won't necessarily support multiple monitors. Windows XP has built in support for stretching your screen across multiple monitors, so you just have to find a card that supports it.
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This article taken from Computer Discounts Guide - Video Card Guide. View the website for more helpful guides.
Donny Duncan, the author of Computer Discounts Guide has been in the computer field for over thirteen years.
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