The ont that came with the the coputer. its is a dell

If you want to upgrade, one that supports dual monitors is the best upgrade. Fancy 3D cards are not currently any benefit with Vegas.

I don't get this video card thing. It's said 128MB, AGP 8x and DVI out, which is pretty basic, is all you need. Then I see adverts that say you need a Matrox X100 bla bla for a grand a card. Somebody with no hype please expand on this. Of course the video card had nothing to do with Vegas processing but it does with the monitoing of the project.

Now I hear firewire on the motherboard is bad just after I replaced my system with intergrated 1394 and ditched my Pinnale 500 capture card. I have not had oppertunity to test any of this with my system yet.

If your mobo has the Ti chipset for 1394 you should be o.k. if it doesn't or it doesn't work for you an ADS Pyro is only about 40 bucks.

So, to sum it up killab:
ADS Tech pyro card : +-$40
Matrox 550 graphic card: +-$100 (at the most)

Then, you get access to two monitors.
To speed up editing, lots of folks here simply add more memory so they get more RAM preview room. Some overclock their CPU...Keep in mind that with Vegas, it's the *system* that does the job, *not* the graphic/video card.

Well, I'm no expert but I did find out quite a bit from a lot of users here, doing my own research and a couple of the Sony folks helped me out too, when I posted my recent question.

Here's what I walked away with. First and foremost you want a video card that has a solid reliable driver. Having one that comes from a manufacturer that doesn't write a reliable driver can cause system performance issues with Vegas. I can vouch for this using Vegas for strictly audio work. A video card driver can decrease your overall Vegas performance as well as causing crashes in Vegas.

ATI cards have been noted for having unreliable drivers, while others are good. I have had relatively good success with my ATI cards, but I have used their lower performance video cards for mainly doing audio work. Definately avoid an all-in-wonder card from ATI. The 8500s, 9000s, 9500s from ATI are a safer bet.

The more recent matrox card drivers are even worse for reliability than the ATI's. Older Matrox cards are probably better in working with Vegas. The matrox cards have a minority market share use in the gaming world, which translates to their DX features have been relatively untested which is an important part of performance with video apps.

Nvidia cards have the best overall driver performance. Their price to feature ratio is relatively better than ATI and Matrox.

If you plan on doing HD editing in Vegas you need a card that supports at least 8x AGP. Vegas sends a lot of information to the video card with HD and will tend to hog the bus and slow it down on a 4x card or slower.

My final decision after all the research will be an Nvidia GeForce FX5200 Ultra. Which has 8x AGP and 256Meg DDR, dual monitor support, MPEG-2 hardware decoder assistance along with 2D and 3D decoding engines. Probably not the best choice if you're doing a lot of 3D video work, because it may be considered slow in this area. But at a price of $90 it's hard to beat for solid driver performance, along with it's features list compared to the ATI's and Matrox cards.

Red