Saturday, April 7, 2012

Graphics Cards and Sound Cards

Graphics Card or Video Card

video carddisplay cardgraphics card, or graphics adapter is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display. Most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors (multi-monitor).
Video hardware can be integrated into the motherboard but recently it has been integrated into the CPU, however all modern motherboards, and even motherboards from the 90's provide expansion ports to which a video card can be attached. In this configuration it is sometimes referred to as a video controller or graphics controller. Modern low-end to mid-range motherboards often include a graphics chipset manufactured by the developer of thenorthbridge (e.g. an nForce chipset with Nvidia graphics or an Intel chipset with Intel graphics) on the motherboard. This graphics chip usually has a small quantity of embedded memory and takes some of the system's main RAM, reducing the total RAM available. This is usually called integrated graphics oron-board graphics, and is usually low in performance and undesirable for those wishing to run 3D applications; however, the new Ivy Bridge CPU's will contain graphics capable of running 3D applications. A dedicated graphics card on the other hand has its own Random Access Memory or RAM and Processor specifically for processing video images, and thus offloads this work from the CPU and system RAM. Almost all of these motherboards allow the disabling of the integrated graphics chip in BIOS, and have an AGP, PCI, or PCI Express slot for adding a higher-performance graphics card in place of the integrated graphics.


A GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is a dedicated processor optimized for accelerating graphics. The processor is designed specifically to perform floating-point calculations, which are fundamental to 3D graphics rendering and 2D picture drawing. The main attributes of the GPU are the core clock frequency, which typically ranges from 250 MHz to 4 GHz and the number of pipelines (vertex and fragment shaders), which translate a 3D image characterized by vertices and lines into a 2D image formed by pixels.
The memory capacity of most modern video cards ranges from 128 MB to 8 GB. Since video memory needs to be accessed by the GPU and the display circuitry, it often uses special high-speed or multi-port memory, such as VRAM, WRAM, SGRAM, etc. Around 2003, the video memory was typically based on DDR technology. During and after that year, manufacturers moved towards DDR2, GDDR3, GDDR4 and GDDR5. The effective memory clock rate in modern cards is generally between 400 MHz and 3.8 GHz .
A video card is mostly and commonly used for games and high quality image/video editing.
Comfortable and best selling video cards are produced by or in the name of Nvidia.

Sound Card

sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal computer expansion card that facilitates the input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces that use software to generate sound, as opposed to using hardware inside the PC. Typical uses of sound cards include providing the audio component for multimedia applications such as music composition, editing video or audio, presentation, education and entertainment (games) and video projection.
Sound functionality can also be integrated onto the motherboard, using basically the same components as a plug-in card. The best plug-in cards, which use better and more expensive components, can achieve higher quality than integrated sound. The integrated sound system is often still referred to as a "sound card".


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