The type of video card you choose for your computer will largely depend on the use you plan for the computer. If you are involved in any graphics intensive applications on a regular basis, you will need a powerful PCI graphics card or even a SLI video card. However, if you only intend to play DVD movies, you will not need another video card, the one already on the motherboard will suffice; they are known as integrated video cards.

The PCI express is a new standard today in video cards. It has become popular in the marketplace, and in fact, it is competing with all AGP and PCI cards, because it provides greater speed and better performance. With PCI express you are able to achieve as much as seventy times greater bandwidth than with PCI - that means that more information is transmitted in a certain fixed time using PCI express; it also achieves this higher bandwidth at a lower cost. This makes it a powerful but a cheap pci video card.

With this style you are able to achieve faster graphics, better system operating, and better power management, and configurations are also scalable. Getting a PCI express card is perhaps one of the simplest and the best upgrades you can perform to get your computer to be more efficient and to run faster. It works very well with your operating systems, such as Windows XP, because the software of PCI Express is also compatible with PCI.

Before upgrading to PCI Express check to make sure that your computer possesses the PCI Express slot.

Before you get a PCI Express card, be aware of the 4 different types of board connectors; they are x16, x8, x4 and x1, with bandwidth that varies from 8GB/sec to 500MB/sec (the slowest is x1). Also a number of different video ports are available, such as ; VIVO, which stands for video in and video out;VGA, which stands for video graphics array; and also DVI, which stands for digital video interface.

In addition to PCI express card, also hitting the market is the SLI, or scalable link interface. This makes it possible for 2, same model, video cards to be connected at the main board. It is a propriety product of Nvidia company, and will help improve the performance of the system and increase speed by 200%. Before upgrading to SLI, your PCI express card, your power supply and your main board must all be SLI ready.