If you do not plan on doing much gaming but plan to surf the net, do spreadsheets, or other less demanding applications, then just about any video card sold today with 32 to 64MB of onboard memory will do very well. I use a 32Mb SiS card in my home-built system with a 17" Princeton monitor I got at Costco for a hundred bucks and it works great.

     You can save quite a bit of money save quite a bit if you go with a card that’s OEM (sometimes termed a brown box) instead of retail. Generally, if you’re planning on building a cheap computer, going with an OEM will save you some money. You won’t be getting a fancy box when you buy an OEM card and usually they just sell them in static bags with a manual and a driver CD. Saving money whenever possible is always a good thing.

     You should make sure right off the bat that you at least have a system that is somewhat current in its specifications. Even if you have the highest end video card you still need a system with adequate specs. Things that are most important are the speed of the processor and the amount of RAM. A 1GHz or higher processor is usually safe and 256MB of RAM use to be the norm but in games like Battlefield 1942, load times are pretty sluggish even with 256MB of RAM and I think gamers should be transitioning to 512MB of RAM especially with these upcoming games that really require a lot of onboard RAM in order to keep the game moving smoothly.

    Many people will go straight to looking for benchmarks and seeing how all the cards stack up against each other and that is a great idea when choosing a card that’s right for you. Make sure you check out more than one source however, because some may not be as reliable as others. It’s really hard to tell which is the fastest card in some benchmarks because a synthetic benchmark is used.

   You should be looking closely at the gaming benchmarks because that’s what YOU will be using this card for. If there are games you are planning on playing, find benchmarks for it with a lot of cards in them and compare. Keep a close eye on how each card takes somewhat of a performance hit when Full Screen Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic-Filtering are enabled so you can get a sense of what to expect.

    Once you have a few cards in mind you should ask yourself if you will be using this video card with a CRT monitor or an LCD monitor. Most video cards these days have both the analog output for CRT monitors and a digital output for LCD monitors. S-Video outputs are also very common on video cards these days. You can save a bit of money here if you go with a non-VIVO (Video-In/Video-Out) model.