VIDEO CARD

     The video card, or graphics card is a very important part of your computer if you do a lot of graphic intensive work. Gamers will typically have the fastest video card on the market so that they can stay on the leading edge. It processes all of the images that you see on the screen. It stores them inside of it's memory. Video cards have their own memory too. Which card you get will depend on how much video memory you have and how fast of a processor the card has. The card shown above is Creative Lab's 3D Blaster Annihilator 2 Ultra, which is based on NVidia's GeForce 2 Ultra chipset. At the end of the year 2000 this was the absolute fastest consumer graphics card that money could buy! It had a suggested retail price of $500. It has 64MB of super fast DDR-SDRAM, Along with the super fast GeForce 2 Ultra processor. This card is a 2D/3D card, which means that it can handle anything that you could possibly throw at it. When it comes to 3D gaming it is the best. The card is capable of storing 64MB of textures, and the GPU (geometry processing unit) which is only available on NVidia's GeForce cards can handle way more polygons per second than any game on the market today can throw at it. This card is so fast that the processor has a heat sink and fan on it, while the memory has to have it's own heat sinks. The fan spins at an amazing 5,000rpm so don't worry about this baby ever overheating on you unless you do some serious over-clocking to it. Which leads to another great feature, the software that it comes with allows you to totally tweak the card in any way that you want, everything to changing the colors on the screen to over-clocking the processor with just a few mouse clicks from within windows. As you can see from the picture it has only 1 port on the front of it. This is the VGA port, where your monitor plugs into. This card is also 4x AGP which means that if you want to use its full capabilities you must have a motherboard with a 4x AGP slot on it. However the card will also work with a 2x AGP motherboard.

     I give this video card a 90% for greatness. It is the fastest video card I have ever seen to this day. The over-clocking options are great, although I would not suggest doing it. I would have given it a higher rating if it was a bit cheaper, and I noticed that it does have a few rendering problems in Quake III: Arena, such as the skies and water textures are blocky in some places. Other than that this is the perfect card for any gamer or graphic artist. I found it online for only $430.