What is Graphics Card?

Graphics card, also called display card, video card, and video adapter. It is one of the most basic components of a personal computer. The purpose is to convert the display information required by the computer system to drive the display and provide progressive or interlaced scanned signal to the display. It controls the correct display of the display. Graphics card is one of the important devices for "human-machine dialogue".

Working principle and mode

The graphics card is plugged into the expansion slot on the motherboard. It is mainly responsible for converting the display signal sent by the host to the display into a general electrical signal, so that the display can understand what the personal computer is doing. The main chip of the graphics card is called "Video chipset" (also called GPU or VPU, ), which is the main processing unit of the graphics card. There is also a memorizer similar to computer memorizer on the graphics card, which is called "display memory".

The early graphics cards were just pure graphics cards, which only played the role of signal conversion; currently we generally use graphics cards with 3D graphics and graphics acceleration, so it is also called "graphic accelerator card" or "3D accelerator card." The earliest graphics card on the PC was the MDA and CGA 2D accelerator cards on the 5150 personal computer that IBM introduced in 1981.

The graphics card usually consists of bus interface, PCB board, display chip, memory, RAMDAC, VGA BIOS, VGA function pin, D-sub socket and other peripheral components. Most of the current graphics cards also have VGA, DVI display interface or HDMI interface and S -Video terminal and Display Port interface.

Bus interface type

ISA graphics card

The ISA graphics card is the oldest graphics card that can be supported by the most commonly used VGA monitors.

VESA graphics card

VESA is the abbreviation of "Video Electronic Standards Association", which was co-founded by several computer chip manufacturers in 1989. At the end of 1994, VESA published the "VESA Local Bus" standard for 64-bit architecture. Most of the 80486 personal computers use this standard graphics card.

PCI graphics card

PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) graphics cards, which are commonly used in older or thinner computers, it must rely on the graphics card of the PCI interface due to the removal of the AGP standard slot.

AGP graphics card

AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) is a 32-bit bus interface developed by Intel Corporation in 1996 to improve display performance in computer systems. There are AGP 1X, AGP 2X, AGP 4X and finally AGP 8X with bandwidths of 266MB/s, 533MB/s, 1066MB/s, and 2133 MB/s, respectively.

PCI Express graphics card

PCI Express (also known as PCI-E) is the latest graphics interface for graphics cards. It replaces AGP graphics cards. In the face of continuous advances in 3D display technology, AGP's bandwidth is not enough to cope with huge data operations.

External PCI Express graphics card

It is connect to an external PCI Express graphics card with a USB or Thunderbolt high-bandwidth cable and it requires an independent power supply.

The heat dissipation of graphics card is very important, Passive cooling, active cooling, diversion cooling, water cooling, and heat pipe cooling are the five main ways of heat dissipation of the graphics card.