Moody Gamer

I have written a small guide in august that could help you decide what card to buy at the time for your gaming PC. You can still check out the August Graphics Card Upgrade guide since almost all the points I mentioned are still valid.

While I was checking around, I stepped on this really useful guide at Tomshardware.com. It skips all the charts and technical stuff that many are forced to go through to decide if a certain card really meets their criteria and requirements. Instead, the guide goes directly to the point. By going through price points and advising on the best card that such a price point can buy. The card prices go from sub 100$ to the 400$ point. Of course since cards like the mighty AMD 4870×2 and runner-up nVidia Geforce 280 are not included in the list simply because their performance/price ratio don’t fit in that guide. Hey, if you can buy such cards, you shouldn’t be even reading this!

To add the icing to the cake, the guide includes the best AGP graphics card out there PLUS a graphics card hierarchy chart which lists, from best to worst, cards out there including mobile versions.

The guide isn’t long and will definitly make your life easier in selecting the card that fits your pocket. Check out the Best Graphics Card for the Money September 08.

Am sure many will be or already at a phase of either upgrading some parts of their PC or buying a new one completely. Thing is, you only (if you ever do so) go on searching and reading up about new PC components reviews, comparisons and prices when you are about to do such an upgrade or purchase. So the issue is, you tend to lose track of what new products that came after you did the upgrade and it gets boring to do the research again. The time frame from your last upgrade and your new one is usually enough to see one to many generations of new products to show up in the market with new features that you know nothing of because you simply already got your upgrade that does what you expected from it.

Now for casual PC users who surf the net and use MS office, they don’t need to worry much as long as their PC can do the usual stuff. Though for gamers, it is a different story. New games always raise the bar a notch or two higher that require existing hardware to play catch up. Ending up at some point to the need of an upgrade or a totally new PC. I usually do my upgrades yearly, which is sufficient for both my gaming needs and budget. Within that 1 year, graphics card makers (AMD and nVidia) release two generations of cards (usually six month time frame). Now apply that to the processor, memory, storage and other computer components and you will end up with doing a lot of reading. Or simply you can visit Sharky Extreme. The site has three sets of PC building guides tailored for gamers depending on their budget. They got the value range (1000$), the high range (2500$) and the extreme range (4000$). They release updated guides every few months depending on the market. The guide doesn’t tell you how to build the PC though. It just points out the PC components that you need to get to meet your budget and end up with a gaming PC. They sometimes provide more than one option on a certain component to get. For example the processor, they tell you to go for a certain Intel version or the equivalent AMD version.

Of course no guide can be followed 100% but these can be used as good starting points and help minimize the headache to look up on each component. There are many sites on the web that provide such guides but through my experience, Sharky Extreme does it very well. Have a look yourself and see what you think.

You can visit the site here. Navigate to the guides tab and look up the latest guides they have.