Would a broad, canonical graphics cards question be a good idea?

Question

We have a number of questions that ask for graphics cards for systems with varying specifications, power supplies, numbers of monitors, applications, etcetera. In the last month I seem to recall some asking for graphics cards for:

• some video editing, no gaming, ~500W PSU, 2/3 monitors
• one monitor, lots of gaming, unspecified power
• two monitors, equal video editing and gaming

It seems that this would be a good situation to create a canonical resource for. If we created a broad , community wiki'd question with (effectively) an answer for each of the most common combinations of video editing, gaming, and monitors, we would have a dupe target to point new graphics cards questions at (unless they're very specific situations that aren't covered).

Is this a good idea? Is it something we want?

Answer 1

I'd say this is a good idea, although we need to be careful about overzealously marking things as duplicates. Concentrating knowledge into one question is a good idea, but some (many?) of these cases have something special about them.

Maybe we default to "there's a reference over here" comments, and only mark new questions as duplicates if they're hopelessly generic or covered near-perfectly in the canonical - in which case we could have closed them as unclear/not-specced-well-enough anyway.

I'd like to see this idea extended to CPUs, monitors, etc., but GPUs would seem to be a good place to start.

Answer 2

I agree with Undo. I think this will be a good idea, if we keep it updated. These types of answers will need to be maintained. I also think that these types of answers need to be written to taken various price points into account.

GPUs (and many other computer components) have a wide price range from cheap but works to brand new and expensive. If we are going to use these as canonical questions, we need to cover all of those ranges.

Updating the answers is important too. New GPUs come out frequently. This may affect each answer from the "new and expensive" to the "mid-range" (being the previous 'new and expensive') to the "low end".

Answer 3

We did something similar on SU for identifying hardware. It wouldn't be the same thing but a 'general' QA can be a useful resource. I'd make a few suggestions - considering the nature of hardware recommendations, you might want to discourage closing as duplicate. In a sense, a "what should I get" should be a 'classic' community wiki we can use as reference, but continue to have specific questions on their own.

Otherwise, we'd only need a dozen or so questions for the whole site ;)