Are you someone who wants to play Battlefield 2 or D & D Online?  Have you wondered why the computer you bought from a local retail store will not play them at all?

     Today's games require a little more than what a retail store puts in it by itself.  Generally with a new computer now a days, you get 512 MB of RAM and an onboard video card.  If you want to play any game that requires a Direct X 9 video card, this will just not work.  The following are general recommendations to make your computer more powerful for not only games, but general usage also.

     As far as personal preference, I prefer the video cards made by NVidia.  Shown on the left is the GeForce 6800 GT.  Generally you will want to make sure that whatever video card you get has at least 256 MB of RAM on the card.  This will make the games run much smoother and look a lot nicer.  The card shown is an AGP card, which I will explain at the end.

     This particular card is the ATI Radeon x1300.  This card is comparable to the 6800 from NVidia.  ATI and NVidia are both great companies for video cards.  They generally put out the same kind of performance from either card.  ATI will sometimes come out with a 512 MB version, but you will most likely never need that much.

     The third, and probably the most important piece, that you need to upgrade is the RAM.  Whenever you run a program, it get loaded into RAM, which is faster than a hard drive.  512 MB of RAM in the computer is good if all you do is word processing, simple games like solitaire, and other minuscule tasks.  But if you want a good performance boost for your games, bump your RAM up to 1,024 MB of RAM.  Or even better, if you want absolute performance, go to 1,536 or even 2,048 MB of RAM.  With 2 gigs of RAM, you will be able to perform more tasks and not have any kind of lag in performance.

     As far as AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) and PCI Express are concerned, there are minor differences at this point in computing.  AGP currently has a limit of how fast it sends information the the processor, which is approx. 2112MB/s.  PCI Express starts out at 8000MB/s (4000MB/s Per Direction (Two Directions)).  PCI Express has much more power behind it as well as a much more upgradeable future.  AGP has maxed out on its speed.  However, PCI Express capable motherboards are a bit more expensive.  If you want or need that much more speed in your gaming, then go for the newest technology.

     As stated before, if all you do on your computer is Microsoft Word, or download the occasional file, 512 MB of RAM and the onboard video card is sufficient to you.  But if you are a "gamer" at heart, then upgrading is your best bet.  Even a new computer can be upgraded for performance and power.

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