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.
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.