Hi all. With all the excitement about the Prep3d launch and many of us wanting to upgrade our GPUs, can anyone explain to me the following? I am looking into upgrading to nvidea - possibly the GTX 780. So, how is it that I can find different manufacturers of this card (PNY, Zotac) for example. I thought nVidia was nVidia, but that would be too easy I guess. How can you decipher which to get? 

 

Lastly, anyone know of a tool that can tell you which card is supported by your PC, according to specs?

I can't answer you question. I will say, from experience, I am totally dedicated to EVGA due to their support.

what nvidia makes is the actual chips that are used for the card. they also make what is called a 'reference design' which is basically how all the chips and stuff are meant to be wired up together.

 

each individual manufacturer such as PNY, EVGA, etc are basically building cards according to this design and using the chips from nvidia.

 

the differences between different manufacturers are usually pretty subtle. some will ofter models that clock the chips at slightly higher speeds, there will probably be some minor variations in terms of what kind of cooling unit is on the card, and then as suggested above their warranty terms may be different. also you will see sometimes different software bundles like some manufacturers might include some free games with certain models with their cards or whatever.

 

basically under the hood the cards are pretty much identical in terms of functionality and they will generally use the same drivers from nvidia as well.

 

most motherboards are compatible with any brand of card as long as it has the right kind of slot for it, which for anything from the last 5-6 years or so will be a PCI-E slot.

 

unless your motherboard is really old this is probably not an issue, i'm not sure where you would look that up other than the manual or specs for your motherboard or just looking at the slot, it should look like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/45/PCI-Express-Bus.jpg

 

if your board is from more than 7 or 8 years it might have an AGP slot which was the previous standard and looks more like this (it is brown colored usually). 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/AGP_slot.jpg

 

the main difference is the pci-e slot is a bit longer..(and you can see, it says pcie at the very left printed on the mobo)

 

cheers

-andy crosby

Andy - you are THE MAN! Thanks for your explanation. This helps enormously.

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