How to Upgrade and Install a Video Card?

A video card upgrade is one of the biggest steps you can take to improve the gaming and multimedia power of a system. Video cards are based on a chipset (a certain combination of circuitry and processors that gives a video card certain features and connects it with the rest of the computer). As time passes your video card's chipset slowly becomes obsolete as developers add new features to their software and take advantage of new features in newer chipsets. If you try to run software that takes advantage of a feature, and your card does not support it then the performance of the program will be poor or the program will not run at all. To solve this problem you can purchase a newer video card with a newer chipset, a faster processor and more memory.

This guide assumes that you have decided your current video card is not performing well with today's applications and that you have decided to remedy this situation by purchasing a newer, more up-to-date video card.