Comparing Hardware Upgrades

Improving 2 pieces of hardware to improve the capture, manipulation and storage of digital graphics. These can be the graphics card and the RAM.

A powerful graphics card you can upgrade to would be the EVGA GeForce 9800 GX2 KO 1024MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express). This card costs £434.74.

Another card you could choose would be the PowerColor ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO SCS3 SILENT 512MB DDR2 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express). This card costs £49.34.

The first graphics card is really good, but is way over powered for what the user needs here. This graphics card is far better for playing games with rather than using digital graphics programs. Although it would run them fine, the card would be dragged down because of all the other lower spec hardware. It also costs a lot of money for a single card. At £434 you would expect the rest of the computer to be as good as the card needs it to be.

The second graphics card is much better as it would run the digital graphics software just as well as the first card, and is far better value. You could even get 2 of them for less money. This card will meet all of the users needs which could be loading photoshop and lots of other different programs at once, keeping them running and switching between them at any time.

The other piece of hardware that can be upgraded would be the RAM. There are lots of different types of RAM that you can buy.

The first RAM type that you can buy would be the OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-9200C5 1150MHz Reaper HPC Edition Dual Channel DDR2. This costs £76.36.

The second RAM type that you can buy would be the OCZ 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2. This costs £31.71.

The first RAM type is very good, but is a little over powered for what it is needed for. Using this RAM just for manipulating digital graphics would be a waste of money.

The Impact of Evolving Output Media on the Design and Creation of Graphic Images

Bigger Monitors
There is a big difference in having a larger monitor than having a smaller monitor. You can have a higher resolution which means that the quality is going to be better. Having a higher resolution also means that you can zoom in further than you would be able to with a smaller resolution. On a smaller resolution the picture would become quickly pixelated and look terrible. The only problem with buying a bigger monitor is that they are very expensive. To buy an LCD monitor with a 19" viewing size, it would cost you about £300. If you want to buy an HD (High Definition) monitor then you are looking at prices in the thousands, sometimes up to £3000 plus.

If you bought a high quality monitor about 5 years ago it would be worthless today. If you purchased a 19" tft monitor for £250 5 years ago it would be worth about £20 today. This goes to show how much better you can get things for in this day and age.

Printers
Printers have evolved loads since they were first brought out. When they were first created there were Dot Matrix printers and Ink Jet printers. These were very basic printers and very slow. These printers used to be very expensive for their time. If you wanted to buy one now then you could easily get one for about £10 or £20. The only problem with these printers is that they take a very, very long time to print. Some early printers could only print about 1 page a minute. Printers now can print 20-30 pages a minute. This goes to show how much they have evolved and how printers have been upgraded. The only problem is that quality printers can cost about £80 to around £200.

There are also a lot of new printers that are currently being made. HP have produced new printers and are part of the company's "Print 2.0" strategy, which looks at delivering a next-generation digital printing platform that increases print speeds and lowers the cost and make it easier to print from the web.

Digital Graphics Software

There are different types of Digital graphics software programs. They are Vector programs and Bitmap programs. Vector programs are things like Microsoft Visio and Bitmap programs are thigns like Microsoft Paint. There are also other things like photo manipulation software like Adobe Photoshop. There are also graphic facilities embedded within other application packages, such as Word.

Vector graphics use maths to draw pictures and images. The images that you create are precise because of this and it creates a very detailed image. You would use this when you are doing CAD/CAM as the image created would have to be very detailed. The main programs that you would use in this would be Microsoft Visio and Inscape. Inscape is a free open source program that you can download.

Bitmap graphics are made from pixels and each one of the pixels has its own colour. The colour is dependant on what bit depth the program uses. For example there is 32bit colour and 16 bit colour. The higher the bit depth the better quality the image will be. The only problem with this is that the image will be a lot bigger and take up more space. Also when you zoom in you will be able to see the pixels and it makes the image look bad. You would use a program like Microsoft Paint to create an image like this.

Photo Manipulation Software is a very good program for skilled people to make high quality pictures with. It is mainly used by professionals to make photos higher quality or to make high quality websites with. The main programs that are used with photo manipulation are Adobe Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. They are good programs but the only downside is that when the document is saved it is massive as there is a lot of pixels in the document. And saving this amount of pixels creates such a large file.

Embedded graphics facilities are in such programs like Microsoft Word. This allows the user to resize an image and crop it into size. It is not a very good editing tool, but it easy to use and for a novice can be a great thing to use.

Comparing Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Paint is fairly easy. In Paint you cant effectively resize images and keep the quality. In Adobe Photoshop you can easily do this as it is a very good photo editing piece of software. The only advantage of using paint is that it loads very fast and if you wanted to create a simple diagram or image you would be able to in a matter of minutes. If you wanted to do this in Photoshop you would have to wait for the program to load, choose the file size and type, find the right brush tool etc.

Improving a Certain Computer System

The system that needs to be improved is shown below.

Intel Pentium D 'Dual Core X2' CPU (5.3 Ghz)
VIA Chipset 1066 Mhz Motherboard - slots available: AGP8x (1), PCI (3), RAM (2); ports available: LAN (1), USB (6)
512 MB RAM
80 GB HDD (SATA300)
18X DVD+/-RW Dual Layer & Dual Format
onboard UniChrome PRO 3D Graphics with 64 MB shared memory
mouse and keyboard
15" flat screen
cheap inkjet printer

The RAM on this computer needs to be upgraded. It should be upgraded to 2gb or more. Having more RAM will allow the computer to run faster. Upgrading this would allow the digital graphics programs to run a lot faster.

Also upgrading the graphics card on this computer would make a massive difference to the performance of this machine. Having either one powerful card or 2 good graphics cards will improve the performances dramatically. A good graphics card to have would be an nVidia 8800 card. Alternatively you can have 2 ATI x1950 cards. This would mean that there would be less stress on one card as it can be shared between the 2. Having this would allow the digital graphics programs to run and stay running smooth and steady.