How To Buy A Graphics Card For Gaming in 2023
Are you worried about how to buy a graphics card for gaming? You can play almost every game on your PC with the integrated GPU or the old graphics cards but at a balanced graphics setting. And to enjoy the real thrill & chill of gaming, you must install an RTX or AMD powerful graphics card. These GPUs will help your processors give you the desired performance that you need while playing high-end games like Cyberpunk, Control, The Witcher 3, etc.
While most users think that graphics cards are generally for gaming but that’s not the fact. Graphics cards are necessary for handling all the graphical tasks of your PC or laptop. Thereby, it helps graphic designers, animators, VFX artists, and content creators do daily work alongside gaming.
However, if you’re a gamer or want to build a PC for gaming and got confused about how to buy the right graphics card, we are here to help you out. In this article, you will understand how to choose the best gaming graphics card.
Things to Consider to Buy a Graphics Card
Form Factor
When purchasing a graphics card for your gaming PC, you must look at the form factor or the size. Always ensure that your card is compatible with your PC’s motherboard. Since we’re looking for how to buy a graphics card for gaming purposes, you need to go for a full-height graphics card with two or more expansion slots.
Graphics and Memory
For gaming and graphics designing or other high graphical work, you should buy a GPU with a minimum of 6GB to 8GB VRAM (RTX 2060, RX 6000+) memory for 1080p gaming. However, if you want to enjoy the experience of 4k gaming, you must buy a minimum of 12GB. In my opinion, Geforce RTX 4070Ti will be the best choice.
TDP
Thermal Design Power identically identifies the measurement of heat dissipation. And it also estimates how many watts of power your GPU will draw while working. If you’re using a 400 watts PSU and overclock your CPU at 95 watts and GPU at 250 watts, you must upgrade our power supply. Hence, if you want to overclock your CPU and GPU, you’ll need a powerful PSU for a sufficient power supply.
Power Connectors
Power connectors are a very crucial part of a graphics card. All good graphics cards for gaming draw more than standard power (75W), which you’ll get for the x16 PCIe slots. And to cope with that amount of power, these cards require a supplemental power connector with 6 to 8-pin varieties.
Thereby, you will need a power connector that offers supplemental connectors. Otherwise, you’ll have to upgrade the adaptors, which is not good for long-term usage.
Ports
Since all the monitors nowadays come with HDMI and DisplayPort ports, all the graphics cards provide these two display connector ports for display output. Most good graphics cards come with two HDMI ports and three DisplayPorts. If you like gaming with multiple monitors, choose the maximum number of ports. However, for better display quality, HDMI 2.1 is always recommended.
Clock speed
Although not very important, you should still consider looking at the clock speed while purchasing a graphics card for gaming. You must know that some GPUs offer to overclock while others don’t, even though they are from the same category (Ex: RTX 4080). However, your graphics card’s performance depends on the cooling system, core counts, memory speed, and architecture.
AMD or Nvidia
If you are struggling to find the best GPUs in the current market, you must have stumbled on the question of whether to choose AMD or NVIDIA. Since both companies provide various useful software, cooling features, overclocking, and other amazing functions, it often becomes difficult to choose the right one. And these two GPU giants give licenses to other companies, including Asus, MSI, EVGA, and others, to sell their graphics cards in the market.
However, if you look at your requirements and budget, it would be easy to pick the perfect one for your PC. For budget gamers, AMD is the best choice. The Navi RX 5000 series of AMD has given the neck-to-neck competition with the Nvidia cards.
The NVIDIA graphics cards are highly capable of loading high-end games. You should go for the Nvidia, such as RTX 4090 graphics cards, if you’re a heavyweight gamer.
