Current Video Card

Admin | February 16, 2012 | Comments Off

Current Video Card

Current Video Card

All computers have video cards but the vast majority are either soldered directly onto the motherboard or installed as a separate add-on card placed in an empty AGP, PCI, or PCI-e slot. Today there is another option, external video cards that plug into the computer via a USB connection. These new external video cards are intended primarily for power users and those that want to run multiple monitors. By moving the image processing functions outside of the PC these GPU's can provide great performance benefits for everyday users as well. This article attempts to explain a bit about exactly what external video cards can and can not do to improve the overall experience of using a computer.

Benefits of External Video Cards and GPU's

While external GPU's are equally at home on a desktop computer they are being targeted at gamers with laptops due to the traditionally lackluster performance of most integrated laptop video cards. In most cases laptop GPU's share the laptop's physical memory, degrading performance and making processor intensive games suffer in quality. With an external card doing the video rendering most laptops will experience a significant boost in overall Frames Per Second (FPS) when playing games.