There are video cards that are ok and aimed at the mainstream user looking for a budget offering. There are also video cards that are massively powerful and unabashedly expensive like the new XFX Radeon HD 5970 Black Edition Limited that is on Newegg now.

The video card is the most powerful Radeon card you will find and has dual GPUs that are cooled by a dual-slot heat sink and fan. The card has 4GB of RAM with each GPU getting 2GB. It also has six mini-DisplayPorts.

I have spent more time and money on the computer I use for playing games than I care to think about. Computer gaming is an expensive hobby and gamers are often the first in line to buy new gear, even though the stuff they already have is faster than most people have or want.

Galaxy has offered up a few details on its dual-core GTS 250 video card. The NVIDIA-based card has a cool aluminum dual fan cooling solution to keep things chill when playing. Each of the fans is 7cm and are hopefully quiet.

Having multiple monitors on your computer is a great way to get more productivity by being able to get more on the screen at one time. The catch is that notebooks and some desktop computers aren’t made to support more than one monitor.

Tritton has offered external USB GPUs for a while now and the company has now announced that it is offering two of its external GPUs at Best Buy and on BestBuy.com. The GPUs include the UV150 and the See2 Extreme and both plug into a USB port and allow the addition of one monitor.

USB graphics adapters are a great way for Mac and PC users to add additional screens to their computers without having to open the computer up or install a new video card. DisplayLink reported last week that it had sold 1 million USB GPUs, without support for Linux.

The company has now announced that it will be releasing the source code for Linux under the LGPL agreement to allow developers to build drivers to support DisplayLink GPUs on Linux notebooks, desktops, and servers.

Today your average notebook has integrated graphics that are built into the notebook and many desktop systems have the same sort of graphics. Some of the higher-end gaming and multimedia notebook and desktop computers have discrete graphics, which are graphics cards that fit into motherboard expansion slots.

Today the bulk of the notebook market has integrated graphics. However, JPR says that by 2012 integrated graphics will be all but gone. The research shows that in 2008 67% of graphics processors shipped were integrated.

I am a big fan of computer hardware and have worked with XFX for several years reviewing NVIDIA video cards they make around the web. The best thing about XFX is that they offer some of the fastest video cards on the market thanks to serious overclocking.

XFX and AMD announced that XFX has become an AMD video card partner. XFX will be bringing ATI HD 4000 series video cards to market in early 2009. This is great news for gamers since XFX offers the best warranty in the industry.

Diamond Multimedia recently launched an extremely overclocked graphics card for those into intense gaming. It is called the Diamond XOC ATI Radeon HD 4870 and pricing is around $320.

The Diamond XOC ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card is designed for the latest DirectX 10.1 games, according to Diamond. It “is a dual slot card, PCIE 2.0, with 512MB of DDR5 memory and a clock speed of 800 MHz. The memory speed is 1100 MHz, designed with 800 stream processors.”

Tritton earlier this week unveiled a external video card which is Mac-compatible via USB 2.0. It is called the Tritton SEE2 Xtreme and pricing is set around $120.

The Tritton SEE2 Xtreme is an external box-formed video card which uses USB 2.0 to work with up to six additional displays (one card per display, four maximum with Apple computers). The company said this device, though originally designed for use with Windows XP and Vista, is now also compatible with the Mac OS. It offers support for up to 1920 x 1200 resolution for DVI and VGA.

PC enthusiasts that are into overclocking may be familiar with the name Asetek as the makers of the Vapochill phase change cooling system that allows for high levels of overclocking on your CPU. Asetek also makes a complete line of liquid cooling gear for various computer components.

Asetek announced that it is the first to market with a liquid cooling system for the AMD HD4870 that was announced officially just this week. The Asetek system is a single slot design that allows OEMs to build HD 4870 with highly overclocked GPUs for greater performance.

AMD is going all high-def with a new PC graphics card attached to the ATI brand. It is called the ATI All-In-Wonder HD and you’ll find the price of it set around $200.

The ATI All-In-Wonder HD combines Radeon graphics and Wonder HD tuner technology into one PCI Express 2.0 card. Key features of this new card include HDTV DVR functionality, unified video decoder technology and Windows Vista certification.

NVIDIA today unveiled a 512MB version of its GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card targeted towards PC gamers. The new Nividia GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB is priced between around $300 and $350.

The Nividia GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB card comes with what Nividia says is 25% more graphics processing than similar Nividia products offered in its price range. It sports a HD graphics engine which can do full offload of H.264 video decoding so the CPU can perform other tasks. It also supports SLI technology, though you’ll need another 512 MB card to pull this off.

The GeForce 8400 GS graphics card from NVIDIA is now available for purchase across the land. This entry level gaming accessory is at a low price point, somewhere around $50-60, and gives PC owners 450MHZ clock speed, 256 MB of DDR2 memory, 16 shader processors but at the cost of half the GeForce 8500’s bandwidth.

NVIDIA’s PureVideo HD is also included with it to increase decoding speeds for Blu-ray, HD-DVD, MPEG-2 or VC-1 video files. It also has the Quantum Effects physics processing technology, dual DVI outputs for two monitor support and is HDCP, PCI Express, OpenGL and turbo cache ready. It’s not high end but for a cost effective solution to speeding up your system while playing a movie or a game, this should do nicely.

via Electronista

NVIDIA has three new graphics cards on the market for low to medium end prices but with high end capabilities. The GeForce 8600 GTS, 8600 GT and the 8500 GT include processor advantages that were previously only capable in the 8800 series of cards including Shader Model 4.0 support, GigaThread technology, Quantum Effects physics processing capability and the Lumenex engine which gives 128-bit floating point HDR rendering performance and anti-aliasing levels of 16x.

The 8600 GTS is the big boy of the three, is most expensive ($229) and features 32-stream processors clocked at 1.45 GHz and reference core and memory clock speeds at 675 MHz and 1.0 GHz, respectively.

The 8600 GT ($159) is a slight step down, offering shader clock speed at 1.18 GHz (but at the same 32-stream rate) while the reference core and memory clock speeds are set at 540 …

NVIDIA has announced two of high-end graphics processors with a corresponding high price. These units aren’t meant to be kicking pixels around for “World of Warcraft” or “Supreme Commander” but are intended for high performance rendering computers used in engineering design firms, scientific research, medical device designers and special effects companies.

The NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 and Quadro FX 5600 have new unified architecture designs, 1.5 GB frame buffers, next generation vertex and pixel programmability, and utilize GPU computing for their visualization problems. The Quadros also pump out faster and bigger 3D texturing (up to 8K by 8K images can be generated), have dual-link connectivity, smoother video playback, more accurate color and image scaling for SD and HD content.

If you’re thinking that this kind of power would sound perfect inside your rig, you can pick them …

If you’re coming up a little short when opening your wallet to upgrade your graphics card, Nvidia’s new GeForce 8800 GTS 320 MB may help ease your suffering.

With half the memory as its big brother, this GTS may not seem like such a buy at first – until you notice that the price is $100 less and the specs are pretty decent if you want to enjoy good Direct X 10 gaming action.

The 320 MB G80 card runs at 500 MHz, the same clock frequency as the 640 MB version and just 75 Mhertz slower than the GTX sugar daddy GeForce card (which is double the price.) Also, this new GTS has its memory bandwidth upper capacity at 64 GB/sec and a texture fill rate of 24 billion/sec, so unless you really, really need faster texture mapping and lighting effects, you’ll be …