This is also called Video Card. It enables graphics and pictures to be displayed on the computer screen. It takes Memory in order to do so, therefore, Graphics Cards with higher Memory have better capabilities to show more colours and information.

If you plan to use your computer for playing games and watching movies or TV, it would be appropriate to go for Higher Memory Graphics card. This will have the capability of showing 3D images. This is also true if your plan is for graphic-intensive tasks, such as imaging.

The size of memory is measured in Megabytes (MB). Typical modern Graphics Cards come in sizes of 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1024MB and so on.

Some Graphics Cards come with TV output feature. If so, this will enable you connect your computer to a TV, and be able to watch movies or DVDs on big screen TV.

Please note, if the Memory mentioned on the Graphic card features, is all built-in, in the Graphics card, the best. Some Graphic cards, despite they are capable of higher capacity, the memory they use is taken from your computer´s RAM , which makes remaining computer memory for other functions smaller. Therefore, beware of what exactly the product descriptions say.

Updated: 10 Dec 2011

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Yohannes Berhe