Question on a HP A6200n

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Chetcb

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I have a HP desktop A6200n computer with a 20" monitor, I purchased both items new a yr ago, I was thinking of upgrading my video card to one with a DIVI connection, my monitor has both inputs, but I believe the video card I have now is shared or integrated with my motherboard. question I have is, is it worthed to switch over to a video card with a divi port, does it enhance the picture worthwhile, are there any pro & cons if I make the switch, and if so what video card is a good choice, I do not play games. but do some photoshop once in a while.


thanks
Chet
 
Its called DVI - Digital Visual Input (I don't know whether thats the official abbreviation but its how I remember it) There are virtually no cons comparing VGA (what you will be using now assuming I understood your description correctly) to DVI. The differences are that DVI is Digital therefore does not have signal degradation as its 101011010 rather then a wave which is how analogue signals are sent. With a decent VGA cable you shouldn't have signal degradation when the cable is less then 1.5m.

Dvi can support higher resolutions but you need a monitor that supports these resolutions aswell and I assume this is not needed in your case. DVI is the new standard so majority of monitors/graphics card support it as there default but you can use converter cables and adapter to change to the old vga if you so wish.

GPU's or graphics cards offload the graphical and visual calculations from the cpu to the gpu thus giving you faster all round performance when using graphically intensive programs such as games, Cad designs and media editing.

As a casual computer user in short you don't need to get dvi or a gpu however if you do just want to spend money, I would go with this:
Newegg.com - ATI 100-505564 FirePro V3700 256MB PCI Express 2.0 x16 Workstation Video Card - Workstation Graphics / Video Cards
Its a workstation card so is optimised for photo editing and pixel perfection however it would be pretty dire at playing a video game.
 
Hello Saltynay

Thank you for the prompt and in dept explanations, much appreciated.

Chet
 
I thought I did my homework before I made the purchase, well nest time I will know, I did a computer review and this model was rated well, but anyways Is there any thing I can do to this one I have now to speed it up, I am running Win Vista

thanks
Chet
 
Not really anything you can add hardware based. On this forum we don't really like big companies like hp and dell as they have a habit of putting cheap parts in then charging twice as much as the computer would be if it was premium parts, they also add trialware which bogs things down and lock the bios which stops you getting that extra speed.

To speed it up mostly you just need to do software based clean up, Don't use norton AV its a performance hog and I would assume that you don't frequent the shadier sides of the internet where your likely to get viruses. Get rid of any trialware that you don't use and reduce the number of startup programs. Fortunately you have enough ram to run vista quite well which should stop you needing to turn of vistas "innovative" features.
 
Chet there is no need for you to purchase a new computer that one is fine for your uses, only upgrade when you feel you need to most of us on here have computers which work more or less instantly hence why I called yours kinda slow. From a cold start the windows xp loading bar only goes across twice then straight into windows its as near instant as you can get.
 
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