I've been a PC gamer for over 20 years now, and building systems just as long.  The one thing that's never changed in all that time is the difficulty that goes into the decision of buying a new piece of hardware for your computer.  This is part of the reason companies like Alienware, Dell, and HP do so well at selling pre-built computers.  

The core piece to any gaming PC is its graphic's card, these little beauties are what power the pixels and polygons of your games.  The faster and better the card - the prettier your game can look.  But with so many choices and numbers, how the heck are you supposed to decide? 

The boys at Gizmodo have created a guide to help solve just that.

Read The Full Article: How to Choose the Right Graphics Card for your PC

I'm going to interject and mention that a common misstep for folks building new pcs is not spending a proportionate amount on their processor, motherboard, and quality RAM. It's a balancing act.

You'll get the best performance for the price by hitting the right point in the value curve across each of these components.

Not that it's nothing Bap doesn't already know, but I think I may scream if I see another $400 video card with a $120 processor and some crappy off brand mobo.

Anandtech is a great resource for finding just about every single component in the sweet spot of the price/performance curve.

i'll second that. lately RAM is horribly over-looked. although when you're talking gaming PCs, the video card is probably the one thing you need to pay special attention to as opposed to a PC you use for work or school etc. cpu, mobo, ram, hdd etc are important considerations for ANY PC, video cards are pretty unique to gaming and graphic intense jobs (video editing, graphic design etc).

Mightbe is right, you need to make sure to balance out your components. If you spec too high on one end, you'll bottleneck your performance with what you skimped on.

I came into this thread thinking I'd say something thoughtful / useful..only to find that mightbe hit the nail on the head.

Balance is the key.

Video cards are the most complicated to match up with the rest of the system though. Mainly due to the obsurd advertising. I've actually seen video cards with nothing written on the box other than the buzz words and name of the card.

mightbe is absolutely correct. I spent way more time trying to get the right combination of components in my system than I do for more other things. Going thru NewEgg and pricing out parts I saw on Anandtech and assembling a system online took me hours! It's simply amazing how many different combination there are, and many of them are not good. You can spend alot on the wrong parts and cripple a fancy new system without even really knowing it.