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Getting Away With a Cheap Graphics Card
theraindog writes "High-end graphics cards get all the glory, but most folks have a difficult time justifying $300 or more for a single PC component. But what if you could get reasonable performance in all the latest games from a budget card costing as little as $70? With game developers targeting the relatively modest hardware available in current consoles and trickle-down bringing cutting-edge features down to budget price points, today's low-end graphics cards are more capable than ever. To find out which one offers the best value proposition, The Tech Report has rounded up eight graphics cards between $70 and $170, comparing their game performance, Blu-ray playback acceleration, noise levels, and power consumption, with interesting results."
It's the high end of cheap. $170 is going to get you a midrange graphics card, which, while not cheap in an absolute sense, is cheap compared to other graphics cards out there.
Cheapness always has to be compared to other objects in its class. Would you say a $170 car is not a cheap car? Of course not, because most cars are far more expensive than that. The idea is the same here.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
It's subjective, and I can't really justify spending $500 on a video card, but I still want to.
I have bought high end cards for over a decade. I've been happy with all of the except the first. I originally bought an ATI Rage128 card before they came out from buy.com. The product didn't ship on time, and so I waited six months (buy.com was happy to take my $160), and I got an obsolete product. After that I got my first geforce 2 card. And the rest is history. I'm an nVidia fanboy and I'm not ashamed of it.
Those who spend that much money on a single component are usually going to spend a lot more on the rest. There's nothing worse than a yugo with a chevy 350 big block in it (to use a car analogy).
If you don't want to sped that much, you will get far less performance than me. And that makes a lot of difference to the experience of gaming.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Prices on graphic cards have been plummeting, both due to the overall memory prices dropping fast and because of the huge saturation of inventories in the market. Cards that few months ago were going for $300+ have been getting blown up for under $100. So before you compromise, make sure you do your due dilligence and check price engines like google shopping or pricewatch, you will be surprised how far your buck travels these days. Also, don't bother with brick and mortar retailers, they turn their inventory slower and their best deals are still month or so behind and usually involve some mail in rebates.
My Radeon X1650 has no trouble playing 1920x1080 movies, and it cost around $50.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well, it's not my fault if you don't understand how this concept works. A Ferrari, Maserati, or Bugatti is so much more expensive than a normal car that they make the price curve look exponential. Graphics cards, by contrast, tend to have a pretty damned linear price curve. Price comparisons against the most expensive member of the class fail when that member is so expensive it completely fucks up the curve.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Then don't spend 70$ on a graphics card like this when you can easily get by spending 10-25$ at Newegg for something that suits your needs.
Price:
$10 - $25 (27)
$25 - $50 (125)
These are cards that are far more than you need for the tasks you mention.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
The thing is that IT-people and Computer Scientists have this uncanny drive to keep talking of and thinking in powers of two, insisting on starting the counting with 0 and generally don't care about the long standing conventions there already were in the rest of the world. k=1000, M=1000000, etc, period. If you insist on using rediculous numbers like 1024, 1048576, etc, you're gonna use your own damn prefixes for them. No hijacking please.