Ok so I keep hearing about how you can link up two videocards to act as one. How does that work? Does the mother board need to support it?
It's called SLI on the nVidia sides of things and CrossFire on ATi's side, and yes your mobo and video cards must support either of those two.
Ok, and how can you tell if a motherboad will support it or not, will it generaly say so? Also, what is the big deal with linking two Videocards anyways?
don't bother. It's for people who think they're so 'leet' that they need to increase their CS FPS from 120 to 130. While it costs twice more, you only get less than 50% performance gain., while a beter video card is cheaper and offers similar benefits.
So a single GTX 512 GeForce is better then two GTX 256's?
Yes.
Yeah, and I'm not sure if you got this from hig's description, but in order to use SLI or Crossfire (I prefer nVIdia's SLI), you need two of the exact same cards. So, if you were planning on using a kickass card like the 7800 and hooking it up with an extra card you found lying around somewhere, like the 6200, it won't work.
BTW, you can't get higher than 60 fps in CS anymore. Valve, being the piece of **** they are, capped it at 60 fps, since any loss of frames is undetectable to the human high after that point.
Normal gamers don't need anything that advanced right now. An average to explensive card can do anything you need it to in normal situations.