Happy New Year Gamers!

What's up Malaysian Gamers! Hey, you know what?- New year arrives, living expenses arises, yet graphic card's price is declining.. Awesome! Anyway, what's your resolution for this year?  ;)  Whatever it is, looking forward for this year's resolution to be accomplished!

Since i'll be quite busy this year, i would like to open an invitation to anyone who voluntarily would like to become a moderator  in BudgetGC to bring us more frequent updates about latest news in GC industry. Thus, please do not hesitate to sent me an enquiry through budgetgc@gmail.com or using the form in the "Contact BudgetGC" section. Thanks!

What is PCI Express? Guide to high speed PCI-E technology

 

 

Introduction

So you want to know about PCI Express? PCI Express is a recent feature addition to many new motherboards. PCI Express support can have a big impact on your hardware choices both now and in the future. This article will explain the topic in plain english withoutboring you with useless information.

Why should I care about PCI-Express?

There are two main reasons to care about PCI-Express:

Know Your GC with GPU-Z

Checking the status of your video card and GPU is a good idea in these days of graphics-intensive PC games and Web sites. This little application will give you a snapshot of those items.

GPU-Z is a basic tool that launches a small, tabbed interface with no bells and whistles, just information in a dialog box-style window. The download is simply an executable file that you run directly - there's no installing or configuring necessary. This free utility supports Nvidia and ATI cards. At launch, it automatically scans your system and reports the card name, GPU, release date and transistors, BIOS version, ROPs, memory type, and memory size.

This utility performed quickly in our tests. It doesn't include a Help file, but its function is limited to describing a single element of your system, and it performs automatically, so a Help feature really isn't necessary--but a readme file would be a nice addition. Although the tool didn't allow us to tweak our system's video performance, we liked that it displayed the driver version, GPU clock, default clock, as well as pixel and texture filtrates. We also liked that we could log sensor data to a file for later comparisons and had the option of disabling polling for individual sensors.

GPU-Z doesn't offer a wide feature set, but it does one thing and does it well. Novices may be a bit overwhelmed by the type of data this tool displays, but if your system's video card is acting up, this utility may help identify some necessary info.

Screenshot of GPU-z 0.5.0

You can download the software here:

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1930/mirrors.php

Knowing Your PC before Buying a Graphic Card !

Whether you’re building a new computer from scratch, or just upgrading your current PC to handle new developments in video games and graphic design tools, buying a video card is one of the most important choices you’ll make for your PC.


It can also be one of the most confusing experiences you’ll have to deal with, especially if you’re a beginner or relative layman. But as long as you learn a few key points, the information on the back of the box won’t seem so much like gibberish, and you’ll be able to make an informed decision about what you need.


Connectivity


Finally, two connections will be key to the vast majority of card users, and those connections affect how the card connects to the computer and how the card connects to the monitor.


For connecting to the computer, there are three options out there: