<p>Which is more important to DVD/Powerpoint quality? Can I go either or and still be satisfied?</p>
<p>You need a combination of both. Without the screen, the presentation won’t look good, but if the graphics of the presentation are taxing you will have to have the monitor set to a crappy resolution. You’ll be satisfied more with the graphics card. If you can afford it, by a $250-$325 graphics card (GeForce 6600, GeForce 6800, Radeon 800 Series are the best) and find a monitior. Look at <a href=“http://www.newegg.com%5B/url%5D”>www.newegg.com</a> because they are the best online retailer and better than the B&M stores (Circuit City, Best Buy, etc.) and have great deals.</p>
<p>There’s no reason you need a $300 graphics card to make a powerpoint presentation. The biggest damper on high resolution movies on computers is low bandwidth, not the graphics card of the computer. Spend the money on the graphics card if you’re a gamer. As to screen resolution… it makes the picture look better, but sometimes if the resolution is too high, normal screens end up small and hard to read. You can change the settings, but because it is not the native resolution, it may appear fuzzy.</p>
<p>The biggest damper on high resolution movies on computers is low bandwidth, not the graphics card of the computer.</p>
<p>Nope, I disagree… btw, what bandwidth are you talking about, anyway? That doesn’t make any sense (hence my disagreement haha)
You will need both a decent graphics card as well as a good monitor (i.e. an LCD with a fairly low response rate, etc) to get a good multimedia experience. But unless you’re a hardcore gamer or movie editor, you probably won’t notice the difference between a mid-range card/monitor setup and a high-end one.</p>
<p>Bandwidth… when people stream videos from the internet… no big files. GeForce 6800s are definitely more than “decent” cards.</p>
<p>Re:Powepoint</p>
<p>Are you planning to project your presentation on a screen? Typical PPS resolutions are 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 (VGA). If you plan to project your slides, you’ll need a video projector that matches the resolution of your slide. The higher the resolution, the more expensive the projector. </p>
<p>Also, the higher the resolution, the smaller the actual image will appear on a typical monitor. You’d need a high-res workstation monitor that will display your image at higher than typical resolution (so as to fill the screen). </p>
<p>The higher your resolution, the larger your file and the more difficult it will be to transfer your presentation to your audience. Say you create a high-res Powerpoint presentation, your intended audience would need a lot of hard drive space and the same kind of specs on their system in order to display it properly…</p>
<p>The video card really has no effect on power point. Power point is a simple 2d application not too much different than a webpage (and graphics cards have handled those for years). All of the processing in PPT is done by the computer itself. Modern graphics cards all have capable 2d, getting a better card is only going to help you out in 3d preformance (games).</p>
<p>Resolution is going to help you a lot on a monitor because well, its what you look at. BUT!! when its a PPT presentation on a projector, it doesnt matter what the monitor looks like, only what quality the projector is.</p>
<p>Oh please. Buying a GeForce 6800 for DVD playback and PowerPoint presentations is like burning your money. The 6800 is great for games, but you can easily get away with a $80 card if you’re interested in watching DVDs and using PowerPoint only.</p>
<p>you dont even need an $80 card…just a motherboard with integrated video (like an nforce chipset) and you are set for DVD’s and PPT</p>
<p>While that’s true, I would still get the $80 card simply for performance and image quality reasons.</p>
<p>High end graphics cards with their own memory are only really necessary for gaming, to get the 3D etc. For a Powerpoint presentation the onbard graphic chipsets (like Intel 900GMA) cards are fine. </p>
<p>But if you multitask and have other things open, since they use system memory (even though not much 64 -128k) it might not hurt to go for more RAM. You’ll want 512 anyway for Win XP pro so add RAM and maybe go for the 533 instead of 400 SDRAM</p>