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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)
"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
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.
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.)
I don't really care if it improves on the GPU speed, I just need dual-link DVI to properly drive a resolution of 2048x1152. Analog is annoying, though surprisingly adequate given the six foot extension cable in the signal path. It's slightly worse than it was without the extension, but it was worth it to exile the computer to another room (and keep all the goodies in here).
Whether a card's DVI links are single or double is something that generally is omitted from reviews, much to my consternation.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Radeon 3850
Radeon 2600 XT
Another Radeon 3850
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.
Every time I think "Maybe now is the time when I can get a decent ATI driver" I'm disappointed. Maybe this is the time? But you chance it, I'm buying an nVidia card.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Be carefull with the 3 and 4k series, they were designed for pci-e only (not shure, but think the 2k series is the same) and they only do agp with a bridge chip of some sort and there have been issues, and ati doesn't support those configurations (you're pretty much stuck with the vendors custom version of the radeon drivers).
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
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. ;)
I bought an ATI card, and having no problems with it (4870). I used to be NVidia only and lived in fear of the ATI messes. AT the moment, I'm quite happy with it.
Still, buy what you're happy with; just throwing in a point of view of a non-fanboy who's seen both sides of it and is quite content with both.
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.
$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.
I poked around on Newegg a bit, and found the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 3850. It's $100 plus shipping, but it has dual-link DVI and it's almost undoubtedly more powerful than your existing card (which is nice, even if you don't need it). The VisionTek Radeon HD 2400PRO would probably work too, if you'd rather not spend $100, but there seem to be a lot of complaints about driver compatibility.
Now I want one of the HD 3850's.
--- Mr. DOS