NVIDIA GeForce is one of the most popular graphic adaptors, mostly due to historical reasons as Nvidia has stayed a leading manufacturer of GPU for a really long time. These days ATI is doing much better than it used to in the past but GeForce still remains very popular in low and medium price niches. Besides, there are lots of people waiting for the upcoming release of GTX 3xx series video cards, which are very likely to turn into real hits soon. GeForce GT 210 is not that much of a good choice as it’s good for HDCP and low-resolution gaming only (you can play World of Warcraft with this one perfectly well though). GT 220 is better already – it sports considerably higher memory bus speed and will allow playing the majority of games available on market today in medium resolution. GT 240 is the absolute minimum for a serious fan of computer gaming – it offers pretty cool quality at a relatively low price. Please, note, however, that 512DDR5 will be so much of a better purchase than 1GbDDR3 – the newer generation of the device really does rock. GeForce 9800GT and GTS 250, in their turn, can hardly be blamed for anything already – that’s why they are chosen by so many gamers around the globe. By the way, 9800GT has been redesigned some time ago and now brags smaller size, reduced power consumption and more impressing speed. GTX 260 are cool – but the price range that they fit into is thoroughly dominated by ATI offering considerably better cards for the same money. And the last but surely not least. Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 and 480 are the top of Nvidia lineup for now and they simply perfect. The highest settings in the latest games are no sweat for these cards – their speed is something that you will hardly ever be disappointed with.

ATI Radeon HD cards have turned into much more of a good purchase after the release of 5xxx series adaptors. Frankly, we think that every single card from this series is a valuable one. The ones you might wanna choose for light gaming and HDCP are Radeon 5450 and 5570. If you want highest performance possible at a really low price, take a look at Radeon 5670, while 5750 and 5770 are the cards that will already allow playing any of the games available on the market today. Radeon 5830, 5850 and 5870 are even better – these days it’s even hard to imagine a game that would put these cards out of use. All Radeon graphic adapters sport VGA/DVI ports, most of them also have HDMI and Display-Port, as today these are already turning into a must on really big monitors. CrossFire system is slowly but surely tuning into a feature preferred by the most serious gaming fans. Besides, ATI has also got another cool feature to offer you: those of its cards that support EyeFinity allow plugging up to 3 monitors into one and the same card.

What is NVIDIA SLI System All About?

NVIDIA® SLI™ system is a brand-new platform by Nvidia making the use of multiple video adapters within one system possible. This is done with the help of MCP – Nvidia nForce® SLI media and communications processor.

How Does SLI System Work?

Nvidia SLI system uses proprietary software algorithms and dedicated scalability logic in each and every of its GPUs and MCPs, which allows doubling the performance of a separate GPU. Now that there is that nForce 680 comprising three GeForce 9800 GTX GPUs, a separate GPU is outperformed by up to 180%.

What Should You Choose: a Single Card or SLI/CrossFire?

Taking the price into account, we would say that the fastest single cards look like a better purchase than SLI or CrossFire these days. They all cost the same but when it comes to performance, high-end single adaptors turn out to be better due to certain scaling limitations. Besides, single cards consume less power. If you are still interested in boosting the performance of your system to the max, the best way would be to purchase something like a single ATI 5850 now and complement it with SLI or CrossFire and another identical card a little later when the prices go down a bit.