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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."
Um, to me at least, $170 for a graphics card is not "cheap"...
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
The 8600GT 512 has been available for a while now, I have one myself, and it was ~$120. They're even cheaper these days. That card can handle about anything you care to throw at it, unless you're running Vista, at which point you shouldn't care about the cost, because you're already paying Mistress Xanthia hundreds per month to kick you in the beans.
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
$700 for a video card solution. Unless I'm going SLI, then it's like $1200 or so for two cards because you gotta get 'em the day they're released...NOT after the inevitable price drop. Of course, you gotta throw in extra for the water blocks and pump, and tubes, and reservoir and such, so in reality I never spend more than like $850 each...Unless I am buying for my Tri-SLI capable board...then it's like $2450, and add like $250 for a 1200watt PSU and like $550 for three water blocks and stuff, so it's like close to, but under $3000 for video cards...wait...why is there only Raman Noodles in the cupboard?
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
790gx and 780g with side port ram are good for basic video work / vista and you can add $50 card for a boost as well. Also they cost less then Intel board that cost more and are slower with poor divers that use system ram.
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.
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.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
I feel like I'm plugging myself, but the Radeon X1950 is a massively capable card, and is available for as little as $60-70. It's also fully accelerated with the open-source driver stack as of Mesa 7.1. (I'm currently on one, running Compiz Fusion with Xserver 1.5. It's good times.)
~ C.
Am I the only person who found this to be a *really* strange turn of phrase?
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.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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.
July last year saw me splurge out on a new box. At the time I got an MSI GeForce 768MB O/Clocked 8800GTX. It cost me a decent chuck of the final PC price ($820 AUD).
This card was beautiful. It just ate up every game I threw at it smoothly and perfectly. Running at 1920 resolution on my 26 inch Acer.
A year later my PC died whilst playing HL2. Turns out that between my GFX card and Sound card was a small little firewire chip that controlled the 1 firewire port at the back (that I had an external HDD plugged to with all my mp3s).
The poor little chip got so worked up after 6 or so hours of gaming and simultaneously listening to music that it burnt out.
Needless to say it fried a few components in my system. Graphics card, RAM and motherboard.
It took many months for Asus to replace my board (as they didn't sell them anymore).
However MSI quickly replaced my video card. Upon handing in the card I learnt that it was old stock and no longer produced.
I was quite anxious to learn what I would get back. However 4 weeks later (ok so that part wasn't great) they returned to me a brand new 1GB MSI GeForce 9800 GX2 (SLI on the one board).
I was extremely happy as I got a great, more powerful, newer generation of card replaced for my faulty card for free.
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.
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.
This argument doesn't work unless you assume anyone who's serious about gaming plays subscription games.
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.