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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."
...first posts?
...the sweetspot is in the mid range. The budget cards are only good for playing those 2-3 year old games you've been putting off forever. The midrange cards allows you to play the current games at modest framerates without having to break the bank. For $200 I can get a card that will play Crysis, STALKER Clear Sky, etc at a reasonable resolution. Try doing that with a budget card.
As a long time PC gamer, I have come to the conclusion that there are only two reason to upgrade your video card. 1) A new fancy game you must play at high settings to enjoy needs more juice from your rig. 2) You find a good performance to price ratio card that fits your gaming needs. I tend to upgrade about once every year or year and a half. I am currently still running on the BFG OC 8800GT (for $200 in Dec 07). I play everything from the good old stand by counter-strike: source, left 4 dead, call of duty 4, far cry 2, ut3 and many more to the non graphically intense without so much as a hiccup. (I am always looking out for a new game that is worth my money and though I tend to stick to FPS I still like RPGs and MMORPGs and even the occasional RTS) Graphics != Good gameplay.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Here's the single page link: http://www.extremetech.com/print_article2/0,1217,a%253D240530,00.asp
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
As the other components in a PC got steadily cheaper, video cards seem to have stayed stubbornly pricey until recently. But that's changing very fast. I'm astounded by the price/performance breakthroughs we've seen over the last year or so. AMD/ATI deserves full marks for taking the lead on this stuff lately, especially in using a 40 nm process for their GPUs and passing the resulting savings on to the customer.
Too bad that as a Linux user, I can't really consider running ATI video since their binary drivers seem to be of considerably lower quality than the ones turned out by their arch-rivals at Nvidia.
By the way, another great article on these new cheaper video cards is at Tom's Hardware: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-graphics,2296.html
And look how far Tux Racer has advanced in that time!
Haven't had to upgrade my graphics cards in my Linux boxes for the last 5 years...
Have you been avoiding a Trojan tax all these years, too?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
They should have included the 4850 x2 in the $170 to $250 range. The 1gb version can be had for around $240 (the 2gb for $260 or so) and regularly beats even the GTX 280.
It's on the upper edges of that budget, to be sure, but as long as you're looking in that price range it's worth considering.
"Radeon 4770 as the best for its price for cards under $150? It's discontinued and you can't buy it from Newegg"
/. 3 weeks ago.
New here? Radeon 4770 just came out last month. It was even covered on
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It was just announced and go on sale in April and you suggested that it was discontinued on May?
Check your news source.
What kind of conclusion is the Radeon 4770 as the best for its price for cards under $150? It's discontinued and you can't buy it from Newegg, Mwave, or ZipZoomFly. That seems to be a very poor suggestion to recommend a discontinued card that is probably only available used...
LOL, it's not discontinued. It just came out. You can't buy it from these retailers cause it's SOLD OUT. That's right, selling like hotcakes. But I gots mine . And these guys are calling $250 a *BUDGET* card? Are they INSANE?
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.
Especially when it comes to laptops I'd agree with you. Or I would have until I saw how slowly Google Earth ran on my niece's otherwise perfectly capable 1-1/2 year old laptop with integrated Intel video. It was unuseable. My own 4 year old Toshiba Tecra M3 laptop, on the other hand, has Nvidia video - the modestly-performing GeForce Go 6200. Google Earth runs very well on it. And there's other good stuff coming to make use of the graphics chip - Nvidia's VDPAU for video playback is a good example.
I just bought a eVGA GTX260 216(core) SC at Fry's for $200+$20 tax. But it had a mail in rebate for $50. Which will bring the price down to $150+$20 tax. I bought it not as a gaming card, but as a second CUDA card. I already had a PNY GTX260(192 core).
CUDA doesn't play nice with regular graphics usage. Your machine will be really jerky every few seconds. I also didn't have room in my main computer, motherboard or power supply wise. So I put it in my second desktop that I use for iSCSI and a third monitor via synergy. The machine already had a 6600GT, which then became the secondary card. I run X off it. Which leaves the eVGA card just for CUDA. Then I can run it all day and not even notice a performance hit.
Havoc Penington, the bane of my Linux desktop.
> 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.
Not if you want to drive a large monitor over DVI. The cheap cards don't have dual-link DVI, so I'm stuck driving my 23" widescreen by analog because the DVI connection won't do 2048x1152 (native resolution). I didn't realize this was a factor when I bought the monitor to replace the 20" 4:3 I stupidly broke (which worked fine over single-link DVI at 1600x1200).
I painted myself into a corner. I had a Radeon 9500 Pro, so when I upgraded motherboards I deliberately bought one with AGP so I could continue to use it. Then the Radeon died, and now I'm limited to AGP cards that are simply not being updated. I'm limping along with a GeForce 6200 because all the decent cards are PCIe.
If there are any AGP cards with dual-link DVI (preferably BOTH ports being dual-link DVI but I'll accept one DVI and one VGA), I'd love to know about them.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Tom's hardware does a best graphics card for the money every month with a breakdown for various pricing tiers. It also has a hierarchy chart that groups cards by performance levels, which helps to compare different models other than the "best" for each category.
Here's the one for May. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/radeon-geforce-graphics,2296.html
Geforce 260... that can't be much better than Geforce 256, can it?
(Hint: Maybe it's around time NVidia thought a new product name.)
Hmm, good call. It's not that they're discontinued...they're simply not available through those stores, yet. I spoke too soon and I now remember reading the very article you linked to.
And no, I'm not new here. My ID is pretty close to your own.
Yeah...I hope my original post gets modded into oblivion because it is certainly embarassing. Don't think I suggested that it was discontinued in May, though :)
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.
Well, that doesn't really count. Intel video is least-common-denominator; their chipsets haven't improved markedly in the last 6 years.
If you go integrated (as in, on-motherboard) go ATI or Nvidia. There's a huge difference.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
you think you're getting the rebate.
hahahahaha
You actually have point. Does anyone enforce rebates?
And no, I'm not new here. My ID is pretty close to your own.
Is it time to start another "you must be new here" cascade?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I bought one a few months ago and had absolutely no problem getting the $50 rebate.
"A Lisp programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing." - Alan Perlis
As a consummate geek, it is not like I, like, talk to anyone else, so they won't razz me for being "out of it". Also, I am old enough to tell where to stick it if they do. Anyhow, "old" games that I haven't played before, are "new", to me.
So, if I buy 3 year old games out of the bargain bin, I am good-to-go.
The latest, bleeding edge, tech needs time to debug anyhow.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I certainly do. And I've never had problems getting the cash back.
if they tested "budget" cards on a "budget" system.
I'm sure lots of people that buy i7/X58 with 6GB of DDR3 put budget cards in their top end system. ;)
If you are referring to condoms, then yes. *whines*
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
While on the subject, I would like to ask a question. Obviously, I could do the research myself, but someone probably knows the answer from the top of their heads. So here is the question:
- Is there any current graphics card that sells for under 100 USD, and has open source drivers that allow decent gaming? Preferably passively cooled.
I have a GeForce 6600 (passively cooled) now, which I am happy with in terms of performance. But that's using the closed source driver. With Intel, VIA, and AMD having open source accelerated 3D, is there a video card I can buy now that has the same or better performance, but using open source drivers?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Maybe I'm missing something but I bought a Sapphire Radeon HD 3650 512MB card for £57 (about $89) and I consider that budget.
So far it's been able to handle most of the stuff I've thrown at it, albeit not at the highest possible resolution - but then I've only got a 17" monitor.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
> I saw how slowly Google Earth ran
Disable the atmosphere rendering, there is a bug or something that makes it incredibly slow. It should run just fine on even the older Intel chipsets otherwise (heck, I think it would even be bearable with software rendering).
Well, in practice with ATI you still have to use "their proprietary piece of shit drivers" and in addition you can neither upgrade your kernel nor X because ATI regularly takes several months after the official release of the versions to get their drivers working again (even beta drivers). Don't even think of using rc versions of any of these.
If you send it to them you will get your rebate
If you dont play crysis and your not running vista an nvidia 9800 gt ($100) will be good enough to run pretty much any game at hi rez, I run mine at 1920x1080
both nvidia and ati have 3d drivers for linux
$250 a *BUDGET* card? Are they INSANE?
Yes. All review sites are like that, completely unable to comprehend money in any realistic sense. They're little more than hype machines with only a few exceptions.
In my mind the GPU lineup goes something like this:
<80: Low end
80-150: Mid range
150-220: High end
>220: Crazy
If you're on such a tight budget that 80 is too much, there's no point in getting a graphics card. Just get a motherboard with an integrated GPU from AMD or Nvidia. They can still do HD decoding and all that good stuff.
For most people, a 9600GT or HD4770 is absolutely fine. They're 80 and 100 dollars respectively and will do a good job at most games at 1440x900. If you want to run everything at max settings, get a HD4850 for 130.
If you have a large monitor (1920x1200 or more) and still want high settings at native resolution, get a HD4870 1GB or GTX 260 Core 216 for 190.
That's as high as it goes before you start losing value for money. Unless you're doing something weird there's no need to spend any more than 200, so just forget about the crazy range if you have any sense.
Perfectly. Nvidia have drivers that you just 'yum update' or 'rpm -i' install.
The OpenGL extensions (multi-texturing, shaders, CUDA) work perfectly with X-windows,
Qt and 5Dwm on both laptops and desktops. So, if you really want to, you can give your
Linux system that SGI workstation desktop look.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Why bother spending $500 for a killer graphics card when you can get a killer hard drive for free by installing ReiserFS?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Certainly, any decent VGA cable has more than enough bandwidth to carry 1080p.
Kind of a random offshoot here, but spurred by the above comment. Has anyone noticed a decline in the quality of VGA cables lately? At work we've been getting Acer flat panels, and while the panels are entirely satisfactory, the VGA cables have recently been kind of crap. One made significant ghosting, another becoming hot during operation, all of them feeling shoddy.
(we were suprised and dismayed by the one that got hot. Really, it got hot to the touch! we can only guess that something was shorting to ground...? we replaced it and the issue vanished. There were no image effects that we noticed.)
VGA cables from the occasional non-acer flat panel have had the same appearance. It's getting harder and harder to find one that doesn't seem cheap around here. I don't recall having to worry about cables before maybe a year ago. Most of our work systems aren't DVI, so I don't know if those cables are any better or worse.
Anyone else notice?
-- "Oh. This guy again."
Plus they'd save on heating costs for their home!
Meta will eat itself
I recently bought a laptop from NewEgg that came with a $50 rebate. I was all set to redeem it ASAP when I read the fine print: claiming the rebate nullifies your ability to RMA the laptop with NewEgg. I was already suspicious of mail-in rebates, now I'm doubly so.
Now when I scan prices on a site, I ignore the mail-in rebate price. In this way, I'm voting with my dollar by at least not favoring the mail-in rebate priced items automatically.
Apparently the drivers were open-sourced long ago:
http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/119049
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=ATI+open+source
If I knew that I would have gone out of my way to get ATI rather than Nvidia video cards in the gaming PC I just built.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
These kind of reviews are geared towards a certain niche of computer users.
90 (95? 99?) percent of users will be just fine using the integrated chip on their motherboard. 90% of the remaining 10 percent can probably be served by a $60 card.
The other day my dad (the classic Internet/productivity user) was building himself a new PC via some online shopping cart and asked what kind of video card to get. I explained he didn't need to buy a video card any more, and he was kind of surprised. I don't think the motherboard / integrated graphics people have done their marketing right.
ATI? Linux? No offense I love what their doing with their open source stuff but looking at places like the Wine site and other gaming site it still seems nVidia is the way to go. I won't touch ATI until they get good 3d performing drivers that work as well as nVidia's (and nVidia's ain't exactlly all that hot, but they do work with everything I've ever thrown at em gaming wise) in Linux. Shame really the 4770 seems pretty impressive.
Unless your talking 2D, then I think ATI is probably a bit better.
I haven't owned a motherboard with integrated video in over 5-6 years. And while I admit I often buy "enthusiast" boards, they are not necessarily expensive (ASRock was my brand of choice for many years). I don't go out of my way to avoid them -- the boards I choose just don't happen to have them. I just replaced my 8800GTS 320 with an HD4770 and couldn't be happier with my little $100 powerhouse. I mostly play MMOs these days, so I don't need to keep up with the FPS crowd. For what I play the HD4770 runs fine at 1920x1080 with a lot more eye candy than the 8800GTS could handle. For me it's more important to have smooth gameplay than eye candy, but with the Radeon I now have both :)
When SLI was new, there was only one relevant card: The voodoo 2. There was no low end, mid range, or high end.
I just got an MSI GTX 260, but hadn't considered whether my power supply could adequately drive it. I've been off of the graphics upgrade treadmill for a while and was quite surprised after I got the new card installed when I had serious stability problems when running games. Turns out nVidia recommends that your power supply be able juice the 12v rails with a total of AT LEAST 36 amps, and thus I had to spring for a new power supply ($60) to make the $170 video card work right. That said, now that I've got it working properly, I am very impressed with how powerful this card is for the money.
...and IN SOVIET RUSSIA, beowulf clusters imagine 1, 2, 3 profit!!!! jokes made out of YOU!!!
Are any of us prepared to do that? They guy with the $500 graphics card is either too busy overclocking and gaming to read Slashdot, or busy on his next 100K points with Folding@Home.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I put in a 9600GT Supercharged (whatever that means) a few months past. I'm happy.. No games, but Trainz at times. Frame rate went from 28 to 91. Also like the 2 HD outs. After rebate I paid $68.00
"There are good ships, and there are wood ships, the ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships, and ma
The trick is just *finding* a 4770 at the moment.
It's $109, not $100. And noone who lists them for that has them at the moment. As far as I can tell, the only one who has *any* in stock is frys.com, at $129.
But two are sitting on my couch waiting for the case to arrive on Monday.
(Upgrade got out of control. By the time I was done, instead of upgrading to a tri-core (from five year old nearly a ghz athlon with plain ddr), I have Phenom II 955, the new AM3 MSI motherboard, low latency 1600 DDR3--but no video on board, and my old card won't fit in the new slots; then the old atx power connectors won't fit, and . . .) I still have my old power cord to the wall, dvd writer, mouse, and keyboard . . . and one of the old PATA disks will stay to boot XP natively for gaming, if I can get the bios to hide the triple 1.5T ZFS array from it . . .
Oh, and I have two of the 4770's from frys.com.
OK, I didn't *need* to replace the screen, but there was a one-day sweetheart deal on a decent 20" at frys last weekend, and the 4770 does drive two screens, after all . . .
hawk