Quick question - Graphics card relieve CPU over onboard graphics?

Hello everyone.

Always been so grateful for the help here - I have a brief and probably rather simple question to ask.

Currently taken the plunge and am building my first PC here! Feeling like I've come a long way to get to this stage.

I was asked if adding a dedicated graphics card (PCIe or AGP) would take some strain off the CPU itself for processing graphics. I know it would open up some space in RAM, but will it relieve the CPU also a little?

Second thing is, would placing a graphics card in an AGP or PCIe slot take up some of the PCI bandwidth from other plain PCI devices? I ask this as the PC will be used for audio production, and the PCI soundcard itself will most likely send and receive a lot of data. I wouldn't want a graphics card 'hogging' any space that way.

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I'll be extremely grateful for any advice anyone can give me!

 

I don't think so. The graphics must still be processed by the CPU regardless of which type of graphics output you have. Luckily, PCs are designed so that the CPU has to do as little graphics processing as possible. For the most part, this is 'sent' to the GPU for processing. However, adding a separate video card will greatly improve graphical performance (esp. in games) when compared to on board video. This is because the video cards have their own memory dedicated solely to processing video. On board video must share the system memory.

No. The PCI slots and the AGP/PCIe slots each have their own bus that run completely independent from each other. I have seen PC's with 4 cards in the PCI slots, and everything ran perfectly smooth. When the PCI cards were removed, there was absolutley no change in performance (a friend of mine and I actually ran some benchmarks 'cuz we thought the same thing a few years ago).

Good luck building that PC!! If you have any questions, we're here for ya!!

 

Thanks so much for the quick reply dlb!

That answers pretty much everything - and I'll be grateful for the luck!