Speed up your PC and get a Windows Experience Index score of 5.9. Part Three

jjones | Guides | 08/09/2008 14:36pm
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Graphics are always a contentious area, as there’s so much competition between the two biggest manufacturers and their loyal bands of followers, who seemingly feel it’s their duty to defend and help fill the vast corporate coffers of these companies. We can safely say, though, if you’re not running an AMD or nVidia card then there’s no way you’ll score 5.9 here. Intel, VIA, S3 and SiS graphics are all relatively terrible and are mostly relegated to cheap integrated graphics on desktop or laptop systems.

Up to speed

For desktop users there is salvation at hand as you can drop in an expansion card. Graphics cards come with two interfaces: AGP and PCI Express. The former is found on older PCs and isn’t as widely supported. If you do want a 5.9- scoring AGP card, then your only hope is an AMD ATI 3850. It’s borderline on the score, but should be able to nose over the line backed with a decent processor.

For an up-to-date PCI Express card, options abound. More modest choices will be perfectly acceptable for ourselves; from the AMD ATI range the HD 3850 and 3870 will both fit the bill with the 3850 costing a little under £100 and the 3870 a little over. The 3850 is at the 5.9 borderline, though, so you might want to splash out if you don’t want to overclock the card. We’ve opted for the PNY nVidia 9600GT. Costing just under £120 it offers superb gaming performance and easily makes 5.9. Finally, an overriding requirement of a 5+ score is that the card has to support DirectX 9.0c or later. Thankfully anything made in the last three years does, while all cards mentioned above support DirectX 10.

Super tip

One good, two better

All the new nVidia and ATI cards support multiple graphics card in one form or another. NVidia has its SLI technology and ATI uses the Crossfire system. As long as you have a compatible motherboard you’ll be able to drop in a second identical card and get anything up to a 100 per cent speed boost!

Get a gaming boost

1 THE EXPRESS UPGRADE

Any modern system will use a 16x PCI Express slot – that’s the large connector that’s perpendicular to the back of the case. Your old card may live in there, so remove
that first, making sure you release the retaining mechanism on the slot.

2 POWER ALL AROUND

The new card will slot in with a slight push, once its edge connector is aligned with the slot; remember to fix its back plate to the case with a screw. Most mid-range and higher cards will require an additional power lead.

3 ADDITIONAL CONNECTORS

These days graphics cards come with a small pile of adaptors. Some will enable you to change DVI to VGA D-Sub or DVI to HDMI, while others are to enable you to pipe digital audio through the card for HDMI compliance.

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