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."

Comments

Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[EVil Lawyer]

Um, to me at least, $170 for a graphics card is not "cheap"...

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[c_forq]

Still bullshit. By using your useless relative scale a new Jaguar is cheap, because it is way less than a Ferrari, Maserati, or Bugatti. (Dang it, I used a car analogy; enter moderation limbo).

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[c_forq]

While Ferrari and Bugatti may be out there the Maserati entry level is comparable with the high end of Jaguar, but my point is $170 is still a hell of a lot for the budget minded consumer, substantial for the budgeting consumer, and considerable for the consumer with a flexible budget.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[c_forq]

I have, and have used the concept to acquire many things I highly enjoy. However you still could not convince me to save up for a high-end luxury car rather than the car I drive today (bought with savings, not with financing). On the same sentiment, I was able to be convinced to buy a (refurbished) MacBook Pro rather than a Macbook; there are many times the upgrades are worth the time/convenience - I understand this but still don't see how the $170 card falls into the "cheap" category.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[SnEptUne]

For people who only use computers for school works, occasional videos, audio sequencing, and 2d games like wesnoth, even a $70 graphics card is an overkill. I don't see how that would be a "shitty" performance.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. For the average user, integrated graphics work just fine. It's only gamers and video professionals who need more.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[MojoMagic]

To be honest... I would have marked *myself* down for that one. It was a cheap shot.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[petermgreen]

Because compared to the 'good' cards, it's less than 1/2 the price people pay to game.
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I don't consider a review of cards that cost arround 2-4 times what I paid for the last few graphics cards I bought to be a review of cheap cards.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[sgbett]

I hate the oft used "But I only use my computer for internet and e-mail" that people constantly tell me when I advise them on what spec hardware they need.

People just won't accept that their spunky new "vista" laptop thay are planning on buying is going to be crap unless thy get some dual core with min 2gig, and preferably dedicatd graphics (oh you dont play games? my ass you won't)

Their logic is that "they don't need to do all that complex stuff that you do". ORLY?

Funny, I can run a full LAMP stack with X, and vi on a P3 with 256meg of ram. Let me know how all that rich multimedia content that's 'only internet and eamil' does on a similar spec, and then tell me again that what I do needs more grunt. /rant over

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[electrictroy]

$70 or $170 - it's still too high, and the companies are being greedy. I'd rather just go to isohunt.com and download thee graphic cards for free, until these companies set FAIR and reasonable prices. Think of it as a silent protest.

(tongue firmly planted in cheek)
(yes I'm making fun of the entitlement generation)
(stop being so darn cheap - $70 or $170 is a GREAT price for a graphics card. I remember paying twice that amount just to buy a freakin' 2.4k modem)

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[rogermcdodger]

The article isn't a review of cheap cards. It is a review of the gaming and HD decoding and playback performance of sub $100 graphics cards.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[Firehed]

A LAMP stack is pretty damn lightweight, just like WAMP. Apache just listens on port 80 and processes accordingly, and MySQL/PHP/Perl/Python are only called on a subset of those apache requests. It's not like they're constantly under heavy use, unless you're running an active server in which case a P3 with 256MB of RAM won't come close to cutting it.

Yeah, in order to get any reasonable amount of graphical flair, you need a bit more horsepower, but 2GB/dual core/standalone graphics are overkill for a lot of people's needs even on Vista, though they'll certainly see some added benefit. The biggest speed issues on Vista are caused by all of the bundled crapware you'll find on off-the-shelf systems and bad drivers. Of course, dual core is standard these days and really has been for a decent amount of time now, and RAM is so stupidly cheap that you'd be absolutely foolish not to get at least 2GB, but that doesn't make it necessary by any means.

For all of the problems I did have with Vista, speed was never one of them. I think there were some very poor choices made in terms of the UI (I like Aero, but they took a mile hike backwards with everything that they rearranged, going from illogical in XP to completely nonsensical in Vista) and one of my systems (which was fairly high-end at Vista's release) still can't run Vista stably thanks to nVidia, but even my retired fileserver box has no problems with speed in Vista.

And this is coming from the Mac fanboy. I switch well before Vista came out, but I've got plenty of experience with it - I spent more than enough time dabbling with the old betas, RCs, and of course the actual shipping versions. So could we just get past this? You can't legitimately expect to run a year-and-a-half-old OS on decade-old hardware, and the fact that you can run some very non-demanding apps on that same hardware isn't surprising in the slightest.

Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap?

[WDot]

Think of it this way--It costs $200 to get the cheapest of the current-gen consoles. Or, you could spend $170 on a video card and put it in the computer you already own, and after about the same amount of work as hooking up and configuring your console, you can play PC games. For $30 less. If you're clever and have some PC-gaming friends who upgrade every new generation, you can pick up that same card as a hand-me-down for less.

So, I'd say $170 is pretty cheap considering a $170 video card is designed for gaming. The really cheap cards are more for video decoding and Aero/Compiz, so if that's all you want then don't get a $170 card.

Re:Failing the spork test?

[bigstrat2003]

512 MiB would be an awe-inspiring sight. They look so damn bad-ass in those black suits!

And yeah, MiB is a fucking retarded term for storage capacity. The old way has worked beautifully for forever, and I'm not about to change my habits because some metric purists got upset about it.

Cooling

[Detritus]

I'd like to see more graphics cards with passive cooling. Every time I see one of these cards with a big honking fan on it, I wonder how long it will last and whether it is even possible to replace the fan if it fails.

Re:Cooling

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean when it fails.

Re:Failing the spork test?

[Cochonou]

Be careful, MB might have worked good in retail space as "everyone except hard drives manufacturers" knew what it was supposed to mean, but it didn't work as well in engineering space as soon as you mixed storage space (power 2) with data transfert rates (power 10). A MP3 encoded at 128 Kb/s is encoded at 128000 b/s, not 131072 b/s.
So, regardless of the fact they were coined rather abruptly, I find the whole Ki / Mi / etc prefixes to be a rather good move forward.

"Trickle-down?"

[hdon]

Am I the only person who found this to be a *really* strange turn of phrase?

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.

Re:Failing the spork test?

[bigstrat2003]

I find the whole Ki / Mi / etc prefixes to be a rather good move forward.

I disagree. If we have a problem with the units of measurement being disparate, we should reconcile them, not split them into two. Not to mention that the Ki/Mi/etc prefixes sound like baby talk, which makes me want to smack whoever came up with them upside the head.

Comparison to older cards?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish these reviews would give comparisons to older cards so people thinking about upgrading could tell how much of a performance increase they're getting for their money. As it is these data are pretty meaningless to me.

Re:$70 is cheap?

[Ragzouken]

This argument doesn't work unless you assume anyone who's serious about gaming plays subscription games.

Byting off more than you can chew...

[argent]

Then quit calling then "bytes". I've used computers with 5 to 10 bit characters and 8 to 13 bit "bytes". The correct standardized term for 8 bits of data is an "octet".

So it's either MB (traditional) or MiO (formal). Never MiB.