Van IT Computers Kelowna Support Forums

Here is a common issue we deal with at VanIT.

You go out and buy your brand new HP/ACER/Emachine Hexacore super computer with 12GB of DDR3 Memory and a 5TB Harddrive, buy the latest and greatest PC game, Call of Duty 18 and pop in the disc and eagerly await the install to be finished.

Once it's done you double-click the icon and watch as your brand new machine stutters and chokes trying to display the 3D picture on your screen. What happened??

Here's what's going on. There are two pieces of the computer puzzle that generally define the machines ability to show a 3D game at a silky smooth 60 frames per second, CPU Clock Speed and your Video Card.

CPU Clock speed is easy, the higher the mhz (ie 3.0GHZ, 4.2GHZ) the better. Having more than two cores is starting to have a bigger impact as well.

The video card is a little harder to explain. NVIDIA and AMD(ATI) are the two major video card manufacturers on the market today, NVIDIA currently has a line up which starts with 5XX (ie 550, 560, 570) and AMD(ATI) is at the 6XXX level.

Nvidia's current line up: http://www.nvidia.com/object/graphics_cards_buy_now.html
AMD's current line up: http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/amd-radeon-hd-6000/Pages/amd-radeon-hd-6000.aspx

Now when you look at a video card there are two parts to it as well just like a computer, the GPU (graphics processor) and the memory. Now a common scam out there is for a video card manufacturer to take a horrible GPU such as the AMD 6450 or the Nvidia Geforce 210, pair it with 1GB of memory and put really cool looking pictures on the box of spaceships or army guys fighting. This looks like a pretty blatant device for playing computer games from the outside but once you put this into a computer it won't run anything released in the last 4 years acceptably.

What matters with video cards is the GPU, the higher the number the better. On the AMD side the minimum for a quality gaming experience starts at the 67XX mark and the 69XX GPU's are pretty much overkill for 90% of the population. For Nvidia the minimum is the GTS 450 with the 580 and 590 being overkill.

So while it looks great to have 6 CPU Cores and a ton of DDR3 memory in your machine what is really going to make a difference is the power in your video card. Cut back on the CPU and the Memory and put a quality video card in your machine and you'll have a much better gaming experience.

Check the buy and sell for some great base systems and then call one of the sales staff at Van IT for current deals on video cards to bundle in.

1-250-486-3025 or info@vanit.net