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Getting Away With a Cheap Graphics Card

Posted by timothy on from the time-value-of-money dept.

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."

8 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Wow.... $170 is cheap? by EVil+Lawyer · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? by c_forq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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).

      --
      Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
    2. Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? by c_forq · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
    3. Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? by c_forq · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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      Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
    4. Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? by petermgreen · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

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      note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
    5. Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? by Firehed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

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      How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
  2. Cooling by Detritus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  3. Re:Failing the spork test? by Cochonou · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.