Slashdot Mirror
Budget Graphics Card Roundup
Anonymous Coward writes "Not all of us are prepared to drop $500 for a killer graphics card. Generally, the sweet spot in price and performance is in the budget category of GPUs. Joel Durham Jr. over at ExtremeTech reviews nine current graphics cards, all of which are below $250, some below $150, to determine which cards are worth the time and money for the gamer on a budget. In the sub $150 category, the ATI Radeon 4770 performed the best for its price. Spend a little more and Joel recommends the GeForce 260."
No problem, take two Radeon 4770 cards ($100 each) on a crossfire motherboard and they will run circles around cards in the $200 range. Together they will use less power than the $200-$300 cards, too. See this for more info.
The summary mentions cards below $250.
I think the problem is the definition is changing. $200 used to be in the lower quadrant. Now it is definitely mid-range. The high-end has dropped out as there is no point to be pushing X trillion pixels.
3) Your current card fails.
My budget card from 2005 recently started producing artifacts during light use and failing in bigger ways during heavy use. It had served me well. I was unable to play some modern games (e.g. BioShock) but there are so many interesting older games that I still haven't had time to play. It seems like what I gain from the price of a video card diminishes as the selection of games grows.
Not cheap enough. Seriously, $150 is a budget card? Hell you can buy an Xbox 360 for that. If I were to buy a $150 video card it would be the single most expensive component of my computer.
If you're on a budget, and you care about value, you'll get a lot more bang for your buck by simply turning down the quality settings. After all, it's about the game play right?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I haven't paid over $100 for a video card in 12 years. I've always been able to max out the settings in every game I cared to buy that was available by the time I bought the card.
And in the first half of that period, I really cared about gaming and gaming performance. I'm sure Best Buy would like you to believe that $200 is a low end device, but you're seriously much better off getting a sub-$50 card now, and another sub-$50 card in a years time if you really need to.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Does anyone know of a video card that doesn't draw much more power than my old Radeon X1650 but is better? I want to upgrade one of my machines, but I don't want to replace the PSU. I'm holding out on a new system until the i7 machines start to come down in price and I see if Windows7 is worth bothering with.
I actually like playing last year's games. I bought Far Cry 2 for 15 bucks on Steam (they were having some sale a few months back). I like to wait a while before shelling out for the new games because a surprising number of them tend to suck, and the real reviews don't start showing up until well after the release, when most reviewers are drunk on hype.
The exception are the Half-Life 2 episodes. I buy those right away, hoping that Freeman is finally gonna bone that Alex chick. Now that would be some FPS I could get behind.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Maybe I have a different opinion on what budget is.. Less than $100USD.. Here I was thinking that I'd read a hardware review on slashdot that may actually be useful to me. Alas no.