Getting Away With a Cheap Graphics Card 290
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."
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:4, Informative)
It's the high end of cheap. $170 is going to get you a midrange graphics card, which, while not cheap in an absolute sense, is cheap compared to other graphics cards out there.
Cheapness always has to be compared to other objects in its class. Would you say a $170 car is not a cheap car? Of course not, because most cars are far more expensive than that. The idea is the same here.
who gauges what acceptable performance is? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Do a little more price checking first! (Score:5, Informative)
Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)
My Radeon X1650 has no trouble playing 1920x1080 movies, and it cost around $50.
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, it's not my fault if you don't understand how this concept works. A Ferrari, Maserati, or Bugatti is so much more expensive than a normal car that they make the price curve look exponential. Graphics cards, by contrast, tend to have a pretty damned linear price curve. Price comparisons against the most expensive member of the class fail when that member is so expensive it completely fucks up the curve.
Re:who gauges what acceptable performance is? (Score:1, Informative)
There's nothing worse than a yugo with a chevy 350 big block in it (to use a car analogy).
1) A 350 is a small block.
2) Built correctly, such a combination would scream, but very little of it would be from the former Yugoslsavia.
Re:who gauges what acceptable performance is? (Score:3, Informative)
a 350 can also be a 32 valve Lotus-designed mercury Marine-built engine whose outside dimensions is as large as a rat motor, that found its way into 9,939 production Corvettes. =)
790gx and 780g with side port ram are good for bas (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:5, Informative)
Then don't spend 70$ on a graphics card like this when you can easily get by spending 10-25$ at Newegg for something that suits your needs.
Price:
$10 - $25 (27)
$25 - $50 (125)
These are cards that are far more than you need for the tasks you mention.
No, there's cheaper ones. (Score:3, Informative)
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.)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:3, Informative)
Not quite. Rocketry is not unlike cars in this respect. There are three choices: price, performance and reliability. You can pick at most 2.
MSI return policy worked great for me (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Failing the spork test? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:3, Informative)
I buy a laptop each two years. around $700 each. I play video games occasionally. Those "cheap" laptops and desktops form the core of the PC market.
Instead of developing games for this core market, they develop games for the tiniest fraction (ie hard core gamer) ready to spend $400 on a video card.
Horsepower of those cheap computers? Well mine runs flawlessly vista and all its 3D gimmicks.
Tom's Hardware (Score:1, Informative)
Tom's Hardware publishes a list according to price ranges every month, updating it with new cards and new performance marks.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Best-Graphics-Card,2011.html
The prices they list are "retail" prices, so you can typically find them about $40 cheaper on the high end, maybe $20 or so cheaper in the $100-170 end. I just took their advice on picking up a card for my AGP system (Radeon HD3850) and couldn't be happier with the results.