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."
Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Failing the spork test? (Score:2, Insightful)
512 MiB would be an awe-inspiring sight. They look so damn bad-ass in those black suits!
And yeah, MiB is a fucking retarded term for storage capacity. The old way has worked beautifully for forever, and I'm not about to change my habits because some metric purists got upset about it.
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
For people who only use computers for school works, occasional videos, audio sequencing, and 2d games like wesnoth, even a $70 graphics card is an overkill. I don't see how that would be a "shitty" performance.
Cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Failing the spork test? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, regardless of the fact they were coined rather abruptly, I find the whole Ki / Mi / etc prefixes to be a rather good move forward.
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Trickle-down?" (Score:2, Insightful)
Am I the only person who found this to be a *really* strange turn of phrase?
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Failing the spork test? (Score:2, Insightful)
I find the whole Ki / Mi / etc prefixes to be a rather good move forward.
I disagree. If we have a problem with the units of measurement being disparate, we should reconcile them, not split them into two. Not to mention that the Ki/Mi/etc prefixes sound like baby talk, which makes me want to smack whoever came up with them upside the head.
Comparison to older cards? (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish these reviews would give comparisons to older cards so people thinking about upgrading could tell how much of a performance increase they're getting for their money. As it is these data are pretty meaningless to me.
Re:$70 is cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because compared to the 'good' cards, it's less than 1/2 the price people pay to game.
I guess it's a matter of perspective but I don't consider a review of cards that cost arround 2-4 times what I paid for the last few graphics cards I bought to be a review of cheap cards.
Byting off more than you can chew... (Score:3, Insightful)
Then quit calling then "bytes". I've used computers with 5 to 10 bit characters and 8 to 13 bit "bytes". The correct standardized term for 8 bits of data is an "octet".
So it's either MB (traditional) or MiO (formal). Never MiB.
Re:Cooling (Score:1, Insightful)
You mean when it fails.
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
I hate the oft used "But I only use my computer for internet and e-mail" that people constantly tell me when I advise them on what spec hardware they need.
People just won't accept that their spunky new "vista" laptop thay are planning on buying is going to be crap unless thy get some dual core with min 2gig, and preferably dedicatd graphics (oh you dont play games? my ass you won't)
Their logic is that "they don't need to do all that complex stuff that you do". ORLY?
Funny, I can run a full LAMP stack with X, and vi on a P3 with 256meg of ram. Let me know how all that rich multimedia content that's 'only internet and eamil' does on a similar spec, and then tell me again that what I do needs more grunt. /rant over
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:3, Insightful)
$70 or $170 - it's still too high, and the companies are being greedy. I'd rather just go to isohunt.com and download thee graphic cards for free, until these companies set FAIR and reasonable prices. Think of it as a silent protest.
(tongue firmly planted in cheek)
(yes I'm making fun of the entitlement generation)
(stop being so darn cheap - $70 or $170 is a GREAT price for a graphics card. I remember paying twice that amount just to buy a freakin' 2.4k modem)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:4, Insightful)
A LAMP stack is pretty damn lightweight, just like WAMP. Apache just listens on port 80 and processes accordingly, and MySQL/PHP/Perl/Python are only called on a subset of those apache requests. It's not like they're constantly under heavy use, unless you're running an active server in which case a P3 with 256MB of RAM won't come close to cutting it.
Yeah, in order to get any reasonable amount of graphical flair, you need a bit more horsepower, but 2GB/dual core/standalone graphics are overkill for a lot of people's needs even on Vista, though they'll certainly see some added benefit. The biggest speed issues on Vista are caused by all of the bundled crapware you'll find on off-the-shelf systems and bad drivers. Of course, dual core is standard these days and really has been for a decent amount of time now, and RAM is so stupidly cheap that you'd be absolutely foolish not to get at least 2GB, but that doesn't make it necessary by any means.
For all of the problems I did have with Vista, speed was never one of them. I think there were some very poor choices made in terms of the UI (I like Aero, but they took a mile hike backwards with everything that they rearranged, going from illogical in XP to completely nonsensical in Vista) and one of my systems (which was fairly high-end at Vista's release) still can't run Vista stably thanks to nVidia, but even my retired fileserver box has no problems with speed in Vista.
And this is coming from the Mac fanboy. I switch well before Vista came out, but I've got plenty of experience with it - I spent more than enough time dabbling with the old betas, RCs, and of course the actual shipping versions. So could we just get past this? You can't legitimately expect to run a year-and-a-half-old OS on decade-old hardware, and the fact that you can run some very non-demanding apps on that same hardware isn't surprising in the slightest.
Re:Wow.... $170 is cheap? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, I'd say $170 is pretty cheap considering a $170 video card is designed for gaming. The really cheap cards are more for video decoding and Aero/Compiz, so if that's all you want then don't get a $170 card.