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.