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.

In the video card world gamers want more power and performance and many are willing to pay huge sums of money for the hardware to allow that. Asus has unveiled a new high-end video card called the Republic of Gamers Ares.

The Ares video card is an Asus exclusive and is claimed to be the fastest single video card in the world. The card has a custom PCB that grafts a pair of ATI 5870 GPUs onto one card. The performance is claimed to be 30% faster than a single reference ATI 5970 card.

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.

NVIDIA is by far the largest and most profitable maker of video cards and GPUs on the planet. This week NVIDIA announced its Q2 fiscal business update and its profits weren’t up to expectations from investors or analysts.

NVIDIA stated that its Q2 revenue and gross margins are expected to be lower that it previously stated in its conference call in May. NVIDIA says that it expects total revenue to be in the area of $875 million to $950 million. This reduction is blamed in part on market weakness around the world and delayed next generation MCP products along with price adjustments to be competitive.

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 and AMD/ATI routinely fight it out in the video card market for dominance and the gamers dollar. Recently NVIDIA has been producing the better performing video cards, but AMD is back with a new family of GPUs selling at low prices that it hopes will grab some of NVIDIA’s market.

AMD announced officially today its Radeon HD 4800 series video cards with 800 processing cores. The HD 4850 carries a retail price of $199 and has a stock GPU speed of 625 MHz. Memory for the card is 512MB of GDDR3. AMD says that the GPU in the card can deliver a teraflop of computing power.

IOGear pumps out products like there is no tomorrow. They also assign them really funky model names, luckily tying those to titles we can actually understand. This newest product should be pretty clear therefore – the USB 2.0 External DVI Video Card, or model GUC2020DW6 if keeping track, priced at around $150.

The mission of the GUC2020DW6 is simple – deliver DVI video output to an additional computer display to spread workflow out. This external card does this via USB connectivity by connecting the video adapter and installing an included driver.