Desktops Buying Guide

GRADE SYSTEM GRAPHICS

When deciding on the graphics subsystem, you'll come to a fork in the road. One path leads to integrated graphics, which come as a chip on your computer's motherboard that shares a system's main memory and is sufficient for basic computing tasks, such as working on email, browsing the Web and giving the occasional photo slide show.

If your graphics needs go beyond the basics, however, you'll be best served by choosing a dedicated graphics card that has its own allotment of graphics memory. If you're upgrading an older system, this likely means a card that uses the old AGP slots. New systems, though, have moved over to the PCI Express interface.

Card vendors ATI and Nvidia still make AGP versions of some of their graphics cards, but the trend is toward PCI Express. Make sure you buy a card that matches your expansion slot type. Graphics cards based on ATI or Nvidia technology can cost anywhere from £25 to £500 depending on the features and the amount of memory.

Rabid gamers get another option: Nvidia's SLI dual-graphics-card setup. You'll need an appropriate motherboard and two of the exact same graphics cards, but the performance boost can be dramatic. It's a costly option, though, and it requires that you know your way around the inside of a computer case, if you're building it yourself.

Integrated graphics | Discrete graphics | Multimedia cards