Buying a computer for Vista ... and beyond

Graphically speaking

As already noted, Vista's biggest impact is on the graphical user interface. If your objective is to simply display a Vista logo somewhere on your desktop to the envy of your friends and colleagues, you can get by with something as simple as a Radeon X800-class graphics card. In fact, for its US$87 typical street price, you'll get a lot more than that -- 256MB of GDDR3 memory and Direct X 9.0. It is a "Vista-ready" graphics card.

If you're more interested in Vista's Aero Glass capabilities, start counting out US$400 to US$600 for a card in the nVidia GeForce 8800 GTS or GTX class. (The 8800 GTX has 640GB GDDR3 memory, while the GTX has 768GB GDDR3 memory; both are DirectX 10-compatible.) Even so, don't expect a reasonably settled Vista driver until after the OS is released to the public at large -- and an honestly good driver might not appear for a few months after that.

Somewhere in the middle of the graphics range, you'll find a class of cards into which the GeForce 7900GT and its comparative ATI Radeon-based cousins fit. With 256MB of GDDR3 and a 1,320-MHz memory clock speed, it will do just fine with Vista. The card is DirectX 9.0-compatible and supports Shader Model 3.0, which means you probably won't get the classiest Aero act you'll ever see, but you'll be well beyond the "XP with a Vista logo" look.

Although Vista supports integrated (chip-set-level) graphics, they're value options only -- typically aimed at the PC buyer looking for a box with a low three-digit price tag. For both notebooks and desktops, a graphics card with at least a discrete 256MB of memory -- not shared, not HyperMemory -- is the way to go.