How do I get my monitor to support my video card?

Is there such a thing as a program that can monitor the variouse speeds and capacity of you're video card???

• I'm getting a new video card soon. And the all high and mighty Dell corporation told me that my motherboard can only support 256mb of video memory... and THEN they turned around and said "oh wait, never mind... you can, it'll be fine". So I want to be sure that I'm getting my video card to run completley maxed out all around. And I was even considering overclocking my card once get it. So is there a program out there that can monitor all of the core clock speeds, memory clock speeds, video capacity, memory interface speed, and ram speeds of the video card??? Thanx guys. p.s. thank awsomeness for computer geeks ;]

• Answer:

  To get into dxdiag, On the START menu, goto RUN and Type dxdiag. Once you're in click on the DISPLAY tab. It will give you the approximate video memory. If your card is using a UMA type architechture (turbocache for Nvidia). It will report the sum of the local frame buffer (ram on the card) plus the amount of physical memory it is using. If it's and ATI or NVIDIA you will also be able to tell how much ram it has by going to CONTROL PANEL(assuming classic view) (Or right click on the desktop and select Properties) and open DISPLAY. Click on the SETTINGS tab, and then click the ADVANCED button at the bottom. After that you should see a scren with various options. NVidia is ussually one tab, while I remember ATI as having many tabs. Work from there. From there you will find information about your video bios as well, incase an update is ever released for it. I am not sure what you mean by various speeds. If you want to know the number of frames rendered while youre playing a game then you need fraps. http://www.fraps.com/ If you want to test how good your card is you need to download a benchmark suite. Fraps is a good benchmark but Future mark 3D 2006 will really tell you how good it is. http://www.futuremark.com/download/ 3d mark 2005 is also a good option. You should use a download manager to download these apps. i would reccommend that you only do so if you have broadband. If you don't, ask a friend or buy a pc mag that has it on the coverdisk. After running these benchmarks you should be able to find information about yor cards bandwidth, no ofpizxel pipe lines, vertex shaders, shader model, if it does HDR or not and so forth, as well as other information which is useful for bragging right. Some games like Unreal tournament 2004, Doom 3 and Quake 4 also have benchmarking capablities but you'll need to search teh net for more information about that. For overclocking i reccommend powerstrip. http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm Some graphics cards come with thier own overclocking utilities, so check the disk. Nvidia has a tweak known as coolbits which will allow you to overclock from display properties.