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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
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 $100. So before you compromise, make sure you do your due dilligence and check price engines like google shopping or pricewatch, you will be surprised how far your buck travels these days. Also, don't bother with brick and mortar retailers, they turn their inventory slower and their best deals are still month or so behind and usually involve some mail in rebates.
Then don't spend 70$ 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.