Aside from PSUs another source of confusion for normal consumers buying PCs is the graphics card. For normal desktop use, any cheap graphics card will do as long as the card fits in the motherboard (AGP or PCIe) and monitor (VGA or DVI-I or both). For gaming however, the graphics card spells the difference between smooth and choppy gameplay.
When I try to explain in the past how to buy graphics cards, I’d mention the naming scheme used by both nVidia and ATI/AMD: the final 3 digits determine the intended market of the card (e.g. an nVida 8200 will be for entry level machines while an 8800 will be for gaming) while the rest of the numbers determine the generation of the card (e.g. an ATI HD4850 is 5 generations higher than an ATI 9800). While simple, I find that this is still confusing to many.
So for this post, I’ll just point you to Tom’s Hardware‘s Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart.
