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I've found myself changing graphics cards every now and then mostly just for personal preference and to "keep with the times". I'm in a Linux environment and sometimes drivers become an issue (legacy), in which case I need to go out and buy a new card as well.

How long does the average graphics card remain useful to the computer as a whole? When should the average user think about changing graphics cards?

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You should only ask practical, answerable questions based on actual problems that you face. Avoid asking subjective questions where … every answer is equally valid: “What’s your favorite ______?” your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers: “I use ______ for ______, what do you use?” there is no actual problem to be solved: “I’m curious if other people feel like I do.” - faq – Sathya♦ Jun 30 '11 at 5:48
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seriously? You're talking about 2 year old questions, which were allowed before the scope was defined. – Sathya♦ Jun 30 '11 at 11:53
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I think it's more of a technical lifetime, rather than a actual hardware lifetime. I've got an old 32MB AGP graphics card that I used to play my first games on. It still works, but it's been far far outclassed now. – tombull89 Jun 30 '11 at 11:56
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closed as not constructive by Sathya♦ Jun 30 '11 at 5:33

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3 Answers

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i have graphics cards that are over a decade old.

i stop using them when i no longer have a slot to put them in, e.g.:

  • ISA (long gone)
  • AGP (long gone)
  • PCI-X (long gone)
  • PCI (almost gone)
  • PCI-Express

In the case of my really old cards it's fortunate that they're an old "standard" chipset:

  • S3 Vision 864
  • Tseng Labs ET6000

which have pretty good driver support still.

But generally for non-desktop machines i'll buy a motherboard with on-board video; making video cards just unnecessary; rather than obsolete.

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up vote 1 down vote

we used (until bigger upgrade of the computer about year ago) one very old card with Ati mach 64 Utah (I think it was PCI). It was running some older Pclinuxos and worked OK (as a browsing machine). In other linux machine we had ATI Rage LT (also PCI) and there was also no problem to run relatively new OS (Pclinuxos 2007). I always used drivers already present on the live CD so never had to compile or download other graphics drivers.

As I tried to clean up my storage of spare parts few months ago, I also found S3 Virge and Matrox Parhelia - I think it was the one with 128 MB and AGP.

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up vote 1 down vote

My higher end video cards tend to start dying out after about three to four years.

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