Quoting buononut

As I'm heading down the path towards "build my own system"-land, I found Sledgehammer's article (and this site) and decided to join up. I hope I don't wear out my welcome right off the bat.

Hugely helpful article... and thanks for the updates!

I have 4 total queries in regards to it's content:

(1) Is the list of VGA cards (or processors) in any particular order? [They don't seem simply alphabetical, just grouped together by manuf.] Could someone provide an opinion (either in the forum or the article itself) of which unit is "better" than the next? I don't want to open the whole can of worms (ATI vs. GeForce isn't what I'm after) but understanding which of the suffixes GT/GS/XT/GTX/GTO/etc... are regarded as better than the next might help.

(2) You say to forget of "more graphics memory = better graphics". So, what SHOULD I look for in a VGA? Clock speed? Pixel thingys? Shader deals? Pipelines? ?

(3) Memory Size vs. Memory Interface? Core Clock vs. Memory Clock?

(4) In this "3-component" philosophy, I think I understand how one component's poor performance can limit another. But when building a new machine, how do I avoid this? Any guidlines? (ex. 512MB DDR2-533 RAM can't keep up with geforce 7950GT, or AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processes data faster than the Raedon 9600GT can handle)

Sorry, but THANKS! I've been looking for clarification all over the internet for years. I'm STILL reading some 1,000,000 page articles that may have the answers, but...

My current rig:
HP Pavilion a220N
AMD Athlon XP +2600
512MB RAM
Geforce 6800XT

...and I can't even run SW: X-Wing Alliance at MAX settings.

First off welcome to Short-Media, glad the guide was semi helpful. Thrax covered some things above fairly well, but let me try to cover them a bit better.

1.) Thrax nailed that head on...

2.) When looking at GPU's you can identify the cards by Series, Nvidia sporting the 6, 7 & 8 series and ATI sporting the X#00 and X1#00 series of cards.

Currently Nvidia's 8 series is the fastest cards of the bunch with full DX10 support, these cards will be broken down from the top dog down to the lower end chips by the following numbers.

8800
8600
8500
8400
8300

The 8800 being the best of the bunch which than breaks down into a few other offerings per chipset getting into your #1 question

8800 Ultra
8800 GTX
8800 GTS
8600 GT
8600 GS
8500 GT
8400 GT
8400 GS
8300 GT

Than each card might go further and break down into different memory sizes in those alpha break downs.

So to put it bluntly, there is way too many options for someone who doesn't know much about the actual components. This is why I wrote the guide and classed everything in a "A, B, C, D" type of grade, allowing the casual user to break the individual cards into classes.

Once you have an idea of what class you want you can look at the different options of each card. If you’re looking for the best of the best either ATI or Nvidia than pixel shader's isn't going to matter anymore nor will clock speeds, it will mainly be just what is the top card offered by each company. Just like AMD and Intel CPU's clock speeds are different and performance is different for each product. The main thing is to check out benchmarks online.

Then again benchmarks are always tricky as you might not have the Quad core CPU or the Dual core CPU they are running the tests in. Most often if you have a top of the line GPU your going to be CPU bound anyways, meaning the CPU can't feed enough data to your GPU.

Okay I think I went a bit too far for #2

3.) Again if you’re going top of the line these things won’t matter to much as for the most part performance differences run around 5% to 15% which is hardly noticeable unless you’re running a 30" LCD.

If you going low end, memory interface and chip set will matter over memory for the most part.

4.) Memory speeds are not a killer in a system for the most part. if you have DDR 400 but have 2GB vs DDR2 800 the performance difference isn't going to be as big as you think. The main goal for gaming is 2GB and you should not have any issues. Now take in mind if you’re buying new parts you’re already going to be forced to buy some pretty nice performing memory. DDR2 800 is not that slow nor is it a bottle neck in the system build. The main thing is the more memory you have the better "well up to 3.2GB due to windows 32bit OS limitations"

I might not have given you the info you need to know, or I might have confused you even more, so feel free to ask more questions, and I will try to clarify...