Hardware for video playback You may ask why anyone should shell out thousands of rupees for a discrete graphics card and soundcard when their motherboard has them onboard? The technologies used in manufacturing motherboards have progressed at such a speedy pace that today onboard sound and graphics chips are tinier than your thumb nail. However the performance of these chips is only the bare minimum that you require for basic everyday tasks: listening to music, watching movies, and some light gaming. Discrete components are needed for greater performance for gamers, audiophiles and cinema devotees.



Graphics cards are usually seen as gaming hardware. But today a GPU is far more versatile and can do much more than only processing the pixels on a screen. The current generation of GPUs by ATI (Radeon 4000 series) and Nvidia (GeForce 8000 series and above) can decode high-definition content and also accelerate certain video encoding and imaging applications. Imagine the power of the hundreds of stream processors in a GPU compared to the number of cores in a dual-core or quad-core CPU. With DirectX 11 in the future, even the visual effects in Windows will be completely GPU-accelerated thereby freeing resources for other tasks.

You don't need a high-end graphics card to enjoy these features-even a GeForce 9400 GT or Radeon HD 4350 which cost less than each are quite capable. If you're planning to buy a motherboard with integrated graphics look out for newer, more powerful onboard GPUs such as the Nvidia GeForce 8200 or higher as these support HD video decoding and GPU-based acceleration, and offer more value for money than Intel onboard GPUs.