Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Advances in video chipsets occur in Internet time. If you buy the fastest video
adapter available today, it'll have midrange performance in 12 to 18 months
and entry-level performance in two to three years. That's why many serious
gamers replace their video adapters every six months. If you're serious about
PC gaming, we recommend you do the same. Otherwise, just choose a video
adapter that fits your needs and budget, and drive it until it drops.
Several years ago, when PC gaming was at its peak, both NVIDIA and ATI intro-
duced support for yoking together multiple video adapters to provide higher
graphics performance. NVIDIA's method, called
Scalable Link Interface
(SLI),
and ATI's
CrossFireX
are similar in concept and implementation, but incompat-
ible with each other. Either allows you to install multiple video adapters that
function as one faster adapter.
Initially, these technologies were used by serious gamers to get higher video
performance than even the fastest single adapter could provide. It was (and
still is) commonplace for serious gamers to install two (or more) super-high-
end video adapters in one system. The resulting video performance isn't quite
twice as fast as that of a single super-high-end card, but it comes close.
Later, many gamers realized that they could beat the diminishing bang-for-
the-buck ratio of very expensive video adapters. Rather than installing one
$600 adapter, they'd install two $300 adapters, which together were much
faster than the single $600 adapter. You can use that same strategy to get
much higher graphics performance in a lower price range. For example, two
$150 adapters will typically significantly outperform one $300 adapter, and
even two $75 adapters will probably outperform one $150 adapter.
We won't recommend specific video adapter models here, again because vid-
eo adapters change in Internet time. If you need high-end 3D graphics video
performance, do some online research before you buy. There are numerous
websites devoted to gaming hardware, but two we have found to be reliable
are AnandTech (
http://www.anandtech.com
)
and Tom's Hardware (
http://www.
Of course, 3D graphics performance is unimportant for our particular extreme
system, so none of this applies. We could even have used integrated video, ex-
cept that most extreme motherboards, including ours, don't include integrat-
ed video. So we went off in search of an inexpensive but reliable video adapter.
Any of several candidates would probably have served as well, but we chose
the ASUS EAH4350 SILENT/DI/512MD2(LP), which NewEgg had on sale for
$29.99, with free shipping and a $10 mail-in rebate. Our net cost was $19.99
plus the cost of a stamp.
The RADEON HD 4350 chipset is no barn-burner nowadays, but it's more than
fast enough for our purposes. This is a low-profile, passively cooled, silent
video adapter that's targeted at the media center/home theater market, but
it's also a good fit for our needs. The card includes 512 MB of DDR2 memory
and has enough horsepower to render full 1080p video smoothly, which is the
most we'll ever ask of it.
