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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."
Luckily, for people like you and me, there are cards closer to $70 than $170.
I actually read that Tech Report article earlier today, and I've read a couple of other reviews of the 4670. It looks really good, especially considering that it's a small card with no extra power connector.
Of course, my needs aren't very high- the #1 game I'm looking forward to is Starcraft 2- but I'd still like to be able to play at the native res of my 24" monitor.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I don't really keep up with video cards except when I'm trying to buy one ever 3 or 4 years, but those 8800GTs are like $100 and can run just about anything. $100 isn't cheap but for a card that will let you play every game out right isn't bad, especially when getting that last 10-20% performance increase bumps your price up a few hundred dollars
Before i switched to ppc-mac/xbox 360 few years ago, i owned a self-built PC with cheapest functional hardware. what i did was getting a used parts from ebay. i got new graphics card for $30 in order to play WOW because the old one couldn't render 3D graphics so WOW looked like a mozaic slush. I was never fond of spending too much money on gaming so i looked for alternative; XBOX 360. Cheap. no upgrade required. no installation. being a busy university student and having number of part time jobs going on , i barely find time to play games and money to buy new titles. Yet, this has made me to be the best player around me because i play one title for long time. so, even if i suck at most of the games, i have name among my friends. being a fan of game doesn't mean that you need latest $4000ailienware pc. and i have tone of things to make up for and brand new pc comes least priority on my list. in fact, i didn't have that in my list.
A friend and I have been scouring our local craigslists for 8800gt's. They pop up more often than not for ~$80-100 and almost match the performance of the new 'high end' GTX260. So they wont play Crysis @ 1920x1200? No big deal.
They still beat the heck out of most anything else you can get for that price. The little niche they have may not last more than the next year or so, but for the time being, if you dont mind buying used hardware, it's a great deal that can hardly be matched by the deals they have listed in TFA
$170 used to be cheap, when all other components were quite a lot more expensive. But today $170 would probably make it the most expensive component (maybe next to the CPU).
I managed to pick up an HD4870 from Newegg this week for $200 with a combo deal on a motherboard that I was going to get anyway. If the high end is only $200, I think that they'd be hard-pressed to call $170 a budget card. Then again, maybe it was just a really good deal.
I had a lowly GeForce FX 5200 in my system for five years. Then one day I went in to look at something while the PC was on and noticed that the fan had seized on the GPU. That sucker was HOT, while just displaying the Windows desktop. Yet somehow it had managed to not fry itself. I believe this is only a 15W card. And when I went about removing the bad HSF and replacing it, at first I tried a medium-sized heat sink (from an old Pentium 100) thinking that might be enough. It still seemed dangerously hot, so I added a fan.
The cards that TFA refers to as cheap, low-end are up around 60W. IMO that's way too high for anyone who doesn't use their PC for mostly gaming or some other 3D/GP-GPU task. It's more than my CPU. And I could play 720P video on the FX 5200 (couldn't play 1080P, but that could just be CPU speed and not a video card limitation) so what do these more power hungry cards offer aside from 3D?
Are there any truly low-power cards that offer decent 3D performance? I did a little research on this recently but it seems that some of the cheaper GPUs use an older manufacturing process compared to their higher-performance siblings, so energy efficiency isn't that great. Also, low-end cards sometimes have a narrower memory bus which cuts performance but doesn't reduce power consumption by much at all. I was mainly looking at nVidia cards since I had good luck with them previously, but the only answers I could come up with were the 5700LE and the 6200. Both low-power like the 5200, somewhat faster (and good enough for HL2 and the like) but still very slow on the 3D front compared to the latest cards.
Powers of 10 are also completely arbitrary, any base other then the most basic seems flawed IMHO. Since boolean algebra is the simplest form, I think it should take precedence. After all George boole and other mathematicians were trying to simplifiy all of mathematics to it's most simplest and basic form. The expression of math we've inherited is a higher order math, it is not the simplest math by a long shot.
http://www.boundarymath.org/papers/BLogic-intro.pdf
http://www.lawsofform.org/
No more nvidia trash for me
Well, I guess you might be unlucky. I have had lots of nVidia cards over the years, and I have found them to be literally 100% reliable. I have never had to throw one out, which is why I have a lot of them sitting in a crate in my garage, since they always outlive the architecture that supports them. Who makes a motherboard that will take a Riva TNT any more?
But the thing I like best about them is that they are so active in their Linux support. Having, over many years, been subject to the line that "such-and-such is not supported under Linux", I find it gratifying that one outfit at least isn't going to cause me any grief like this. Sure, from time to time, new versions of the kernel do break their drivers, but on every one of these occasions nVidia have already had a fix in place before I found that out.
- $70 or $170 is a GREAT price for a graphics card.
$70 is great, $170 is a little high.
I mean, think about it, a console can debut as high as $600 (thank you Sony), and computers cost as little as $300.
I think it's great that the time has finally come when I can seriously find a deal on a computer for $300-400, spend $100-200 on a graphics card and have a system that can honestly play damn near any game on the market at my monitor's maximum supported res.
The other $600 between what I'll actually spend and the best card on the market is for the insane people that just have to turn every single goody the graphics engine supports up to the maximum setting.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
"How else do you want them to compare graphics cards?"
Actually since you asked.....
How do they compare to my CURRENT card :) That's the one i want to see.
All the $100 are similar, got it. How much better are they than the $150 card card i got 2 years ago? Any old reviews tend to use different test rigs and different benchmarks :(