Nvidia's $200 GTX 460 Ups Bargain Performance 197
NervousNerd writes "Nvidia's first DirectX 11 offerings ran hot and offered a negligible performance difference compared to ATI's Radeon HD 5800 series for the cost. Also missing was the $200 mid-range part. But that stopped when Nvidia released the GTX 460 based on a modified version of their infamous Fermi architecture. The GTX 460 offers incredible performance for the price and soundly beats ATI's $200 offering, the HD 5830."
Bargain? $200? (Score:4, Insightful)
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Re:Bargain? $200? (Score:5, Insightful)
Can we have ONE video card news posting discussion without a flood of people preaching how it's supposedly stupid to spend anything more than 100$ on a videocard? Please? People have different needs and expectations.
Re:Bargain? $200? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't think it's stupid to spend more than $100 on a video carrd (I definitely have), but it does seem hard to argue that $200 is a bargain priced video card. I would probably call it mid-range?
If 200$ is mid-range, what does that make 300$ and 400$ videocards, assuming we call 500-600$ videocards the high-end?
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Re:Bargain? $200? (Score:5, Funny)
If 200$ is mid-range, what does that make 300$ and 400$ videocards, assuming we call 500-600$ videocards the high-end?
Upper middle class with distinction
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Re:Bargain? $200? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would probably call it mid-range?
So would the TFS, apparently. I guess Taco's got some cash to play with. :)
That said, if it beats out the other cards in it's price range, and has the same price then it's probably fair to call it a bargain within that slice of the market.
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It's a bargin priced performance video card not a bargin priced video card. Interestingly enough, "bargin performance" is the phrase used in the summary.
You're not going to get solid performance at a respectable resolution in modern video games for below $150-200 or so. If you spend below that you're either having to drastically cut resolution or you're cutting way back on the settings. The $200ish range of cards will let you run with most all of the pretty stuff turned on at approximately 1080p resoluti
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Also not everything is about speed or horsepower but capability.
I would buy the ATI card all things being equal for the "Eyefinity" technology alone.
It would let me use 3 monitors not just 2 (tho one needs to be a special new one with a "display port" apparently)
It would also let me set different resolutions on my different monitors.
With my current setup I would likely have HD 1080 resolution set on my 37" HD TV DVI-HDMI 16:9 connection, and then run my 4:3 normal LCD monitors at a more usable resolution.
Wi
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nVidia actually just came out with their eyefinity rival called nVidia Surround. It isn't as good as eyefinity though, since it only drives up to six monitors, and you'll need 2x cards in SLI. I'm also not sure if it can do different resolutions on different displays.
The one advantage it has is that it can do 3d on the displays if somehow have the cash to spend $200 on the glasses setup, and whatever it costs to get 3 identical versions of one of the supported 120hz monitors.
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You realize thats as silly as arguing some people only need a windows 95 machine, right? Why would that kind of article be exciting?
You shouldn't even need to spend anything on a video card, everything now-adays has something integrated, from laptops to desktops there is always some form of output. That would fit most people's needs.
People who need stronger video cards should be expecting to shell out a bit of money.
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You shouldn't even need to spend anything on a video card, everything now-adays has something integrated, from laptops to desktops there is always some form of output. That would fit most people's needs.
VESA isn't good enough, and neither is integrated graphics if you want to run games or CAD apps from past the Voodoo3 era. (Like Voodoo3, Intel GMA 950 lacks hardware vertex processing.)
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You're stronger at playing video games if you're better at playing video games.
You know that stronger can be applied to more than just physical strength.
One might say that Video games are one my strengths.
You know English is flexible like that, which sure is a bitch to people learning it.
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Can we have ONE video card news posting discussion without a flood of people preaching how it's supposedly stupid to spend anything more than 100$ on a videocard? Please? People have different needs and expectations.
It's not about whether it's stupid, it's about the definition of the word bargain. Frankly, even $100 is stretching the term in this economy, but we're still so awed by not-even-raytraced 3D graphics in realtime that we're willing to accept that we should be grateful to pay a hundred bucks for a couple wafers of fiberglass with some plastic-packed chips of interestingly impure sand that we're going to replace in a few years at most* anyway. And I say that as someone who was grateful to get a GTS 240 for $10
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You can buy a whole PC capable of playing a generation-ago's games at medium quality for that, shipped!
From where ?
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It certainly isn't cheap, but if the performance / dollar ratio is comparatively high (it may well be) then one might call it a bargain. Independent of what you want to spend or if you think it is important.
How about a car analogy? A $2 million Ferrari for $250,000 is a bargain, even if you can't afford it.
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Re:Bargain? $200? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you consult the dictionary before typing that? Bargain isn't related to how much something costs, but how much it is worth compared to how much it costs. This is a bargain.
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I didn't see a scatter plot of price vs fps. Does this $200 card get you twice the fps of a $100 card? What do you get for the extra hundred that's actually worth an extra hundred?
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That's true. The first 30FPS are pretty worthless. But after you reach 60FPS, that's pretty worthless too. A $200 card that gives you 120FPS is not twice as good as a $100 card that gives you 60FPS.
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A $200 card that gives you 120FPS is not twice as good as a $100 card that gives you 60FPS.
It is when the next generation of games comes around. And even for current games you can just set for maximum anti-aliasing and that will get you back down to 60 :)
Also, its not all about average framerates - gotta keep the minimum framerates in mind. I'd rather have a card with a rock steady 45fps than one that averages 60 but often drops into the 30s and below.
Re:Bargain? $200? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well for a hard core gamer that is pretty cheap. I do not spend that much on video cards but if it is your hobby.
Ever see how much golf clubs costs? Or motorcycle gear? How about the cost of gas for a boat?
This isn't that bad in comparison.
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- A golfer(club costs, Green Fees)
- Weekend car enthusiasts($1200 to upgarde their brakes, petrol for the Saturday hoon, then theres next weeks mod cost)
- Boating (Docking fees, an engine service is thousands)
- Woman at work comment they spend half their weekly pay on clothes (eg $300 - $600) *every week*.
The common factor in all the above would be the influence of dep
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The critical difference here is that the other three will at least get you out of the house and into the sunshine and fresh air.
What's your point?
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The critical difference here is that you can play computer games in summer or winter, sunshine or rain.
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I can do that with my motorcycle. I live in Florida :)
The thing is simply what do you want to spend your money on for fun.
Truth be known it would probably be better if we used it to pay down any debt that we have and or put into our retirement accounts but man does not live by bread alone.
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Oh, really? Show me where's your motorcycle in these images [google.com] ;)
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True but you will also not be playing video games. And probably not for days afterwords as well since you will have no AC and only a generator for power.
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True but riding a motorcycle and or riding around in a boat will not always burn any more calories than playing video games.
Off road riding or track time on a motor cycle probably will. Getting on your cruiser and going to the bar for a beer not so much.
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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
No it does. When you use this card you have to negotiate with it for it to decide what performance it will give, and what you will do for it in return.
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Why is this modded funny? He's right - $200 isn't a "bargain price". I don't think I've paid that much for a video card ever - and if I have, it was back around 2001, and only once.
A "bargain" card is under $100, at most. To most people, that's what the cost of an upgrade (to pretty much anything) should cost. Most products try really, really hard to get in under that $100 mark on account of people trying to not spend more than that amount on a given item.
In my book, a "bargain" card is $50 or less. You kno
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Something is a "bargain" when it has a very good price/value ratio.
A full frame DSLR camera for $1000 would be a bargain, though you can get a DSLR for $400 easily, and if you're not picky and just want any digital camera at all you can get it for $50.
NV has it made until... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:NV has it made until... (Score:4, Interesting)
AMD lowers their prices, which they can do quite easily.
Whichever company restores sanity to their chipset numbering scheme will get my money.
"Bargain" or not, it's simply not worth my time to investigate each card and decipher how a 460 GTX would perform compare to my 8800 GTX. My four year-old card has so far handled every game I've thrown at it at 1920x1080 without giving me the impression that I'm lacking on the eye-candy.
I have the money to spare, but I no longer have the free time to make a hobby of staying up to date on all the graphics card releases. All the manufacturers are failing to sell me on how returning to a more frequent upgrade cycle would improve my life, and they certainly aren't making it easy (in terms of time) to find out the relevant details.
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ATi's numbering has been pretty easy to follow lately. The first number is the series, this tells you the basics in terms of features, process, and so on. 5 series are DX11 40nm parts, 4 series are DX 10.1 40nm parts, etc. The next number tells you the major performance class. The ones they seem to like to use are 9 for their high end dual boards, 8 for their high end single boards, 7 for their midrange boards, and 5 (and sometimes 6) for low end boards. The final two numbers are the sub category for perfor
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With video cards you have to turn your brain on a bit and do some research to determine what you are really getting. No way to give you a single, universally applicable, number.
From an engineering viewpoint, that statement is absolutely true. The end user, however, doesn't spend their day benchmarking...they care about one thing: does X card run Y game at Z settings?. At one time I cared about clock speed, memory speed, pipelines, etc, but not any more.
What I'm saying is that my money is up for grabs for t
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Benchmarks are easy to find. If you are interested in latest greatest, go to HardOCP. They bench new cards in a highly realistic manner. You can then compare that to what you get on your current card and see if you like the upgrade. For bigger benchmark sets that do multiple generations of hardware, go look at Tom's Hardware's charts. They have a bunch of cards running something and show you the results, though they are more synthetic.
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Thank you for offering clarity in a subject that's frequently confusing to people who don't spend enormous amounts of effort learning the intricacies of the GFX card industry.
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I agree, but the key word is lately. I despised product names like Radeon X600 (based on Radeon 9600) and Radeon 9200 (based on Radeon 8500).
Still mostly true. My heart broke a little when I read about Mobility Radeon HD 5165/5145 [amd.com], which are DX 10.1 parts.
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NVidia engineering sucks badly (Score:3, Insightful)
After two Nvidia video cards and one chip-set died early on me from overheating, despite additional cooling, I am not buying their trash again. Maybe "pro-gamers" do not mind an expensive card or main-board dying after 1-1.5 years, but I do mind rather strongly.
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I've had about 10-12 nvidia cards in my personal workstation - never had a single issue with any of them drawing a single pixel wrong - currently have 2x GTX 280's in a 2x quad core xeon machine and they are working perfectly and generating a lot of heat but apparently dissipating it properly.
Now ATI cards - I had the problem documented here: http://www.frostytech.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1288 [frostytech.com] - after 6 cards (not even kidding) die in less than 24 hours of use I finally sent the last one back and told
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Workstation being the key word there.
nVidia had some extremely bad mobile chipsets and mobile video cards when the 8800GT reigned on the desktops.
By bad I mean that the solder stopped working after some time.
It still haunts them today.
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I'm guessing you just have had bad luck. I've had 7 Nvidia based video cards and 3 mobo chipsets. Never had one die on me yet. Only card I've ever had die on my was a 3dfx Banshee based card.
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nVidia makes the chips, not the board they are on.
That isn't to say they couldn't still be responsible, but the only problems I've had with nVidia video cards were when I bought the really cheap ones from an unknown vendor... and that was ages ago (during the GeForce 2 line).
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Everyone's experience is different, I suppose. I have a GeForce 5200 that's been in operation for over 7 years now, and it's still going strong.
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Why?
There's only one problem (Score:3, Interesting)
They are months too late, and ATI's next offering will be released (or at least announced) relatively soon, given their track record. I'm glad to see Nvidia releasing something that gives ATI a run for their money in the budget arena, but still...I think that advantage is going to disappear once ATI updates their line again.
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Oh, I wouldn't say that. A couple weeks ago I decided to upgrade my 8800GTS. I read a few reviews, saw some benchmarks, and wasn't really impressed with ATI, but was willing to give them a chance. I decided to spend anywhere between $150 and $200.
At my local Microcenter I could get a 5770 for around $179 or a GTX275 for $199. The difference between these cards is night and day. I bought the 4770 and returned it because it wasn't much faster than my 8800. The GTX275 on the other hand, just blows the 5770
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I'm assuming you meant 5770 here and that the 4 was a typo, since the other time the card number is mentioned, it's the 5770.
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At my local Microcenter I could get a 5770 for around $179 or a GTX275 for $199. The difference between these cards is night and day. I bought the 4770 and returned it because it wasn't much faster than my 8800. The GTX275 on the other hand, just blows the 5770 away.
As always, check the benchmarks for the game you play. They're close in many games, but a few go exceptionally one way or the other. Mass Effect 2 for example is a very good game for the GTX275 compared to the 5770, other games not so much.
Re:There's only one problem (Score:5, Interesting)
An announcement doesn't mean much without a release. Also, I'd guess that nVidia will be offering updates fairly soon as well. Basically updates to cards are generally either because there's a new architecture, which isn't happening for either company in this case since that take a much longer time, or a new lithography process. I'm not sure what the companies are looking at next, but Global Foundries has a 32nm node online now. They could be looking at using that.
You have to remember that development continues all the time, and even as a card is being released the next gen, and the gen after that and probably even more than that are being worked on. Takes a long time to bring something from idea to released silicon. So this isn't a race where a company get ahead and the other one can never catch up. Were that the case, well then ATi would be long behind now, because the 8800 series was completely unexpected, and had performance ATi could not match. They had to delay their launch a cycle and still their hardware wasn't a match for it. However, as time went on, they caught up and now have exceeded nVidia in many regards (certainly in being first with DX11).
The only way this would be "too late" in any respect is if ATi already had a better card out. Remember that people do not wait forever to buy parts. You can't say "But something better will come in a few months!" because something better will ALWAYS come in a few months. Do that and you'll never have a system. If someone buys a computer now, and wants to spend $200ish on a video card, the 460 is a realistic choice.
Also note that despite the 480s being hot, and late to the game, it isn't a failure. They moved plenty of units. Not near as many as they'd like I'm sure, but people bought those things left and right.
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An announcement without a release? I just bought one at Newegg. They have quite a large variety of GTX 460 cards available.
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Disregard that. I now see you were talking about ATI's announcement.
Soundly beats the 5830? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Soundly beats the 5830? (Score:4, Interesting)
The GTX460 is an overclocking monster, you can bring it to within GTX470 speeds for 2/3 of the price.
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If you don't mind the additional heat, noise (due to fan spinning up due to heat), artifacts, crashes (I've yet to meet an overclocker that gets the fact that even though the stress test doesn't crash, that doesn't mean that the crashes in XYZ game aren't overclocking related), void guarantee, reduced lifetime, and other problems associated with overclocking.
Plus, I've yet to see a game which won't run happily on a 9800 GT. There are so many console ports these days that even a card a few years old is plent
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The GTX460 runs cooler and produces less noise than a GTX470... Even overclocked...
EVGA also warranties their cards even if you overclock them.
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Plus, I've yet to see a game which won't run happily on a 9800 GT.
That really depends on the game settings, resolution, etc.
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Where's your proof? I run a vast majority of my gear over clocked, and have so for years without issue.
Re:Soundly beats the 5830? (Score:4, Insightful)
In the event of a tie, any card that doesn't require Catalyst is a win in my book.
Another review, with architecture comparison (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=954 [pcper.com]
This review also has a page that attempts to compare the new GF104 architecture on a clock per clock basis with the original GF100: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=954&type=expert&pid=12 [pcper.com]
Holy Slashvertising Batman (Score:5, Funny)
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The summary reads like it was written by someone at nVidia; based on the summary you'd think this card could do cold fusion and mow my lawn at the same time while creating mind-blowing graphical displays.
Well damn, that pretty much settles the above debate about it being a bargain card as far as I'm concerned.
ATI Users: A Question (Score:2, Interesting)
Are current ATI graphics cards, especially the cards with 1GB RAM, comparable or better than current Nvidia cards for PC gaming? I've heard for years people calling out ATI drivers as *^#@, convince me otherwise. This isn't a troll, it's a call for opinions from someone who would rather avoid an Nvidia purchase, even though game title after title splash the Nvidia logo in your face when you launch them. How are ATI's drivers now, how well do these cards "game"?
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That's not the end-all, be-all for all comparisons, but it gives you a good idea how the different brands and generations compare to each other in general. Before Nvidia released the GTX400 series months later, ATI had the two fastest video cards available (the HD5870 and the dual-GPU HD5970 which is still the fastest single card).
Nvidia seems to throw more money at developers with their The Way It's Meant To Be Played program, bu
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For drivers:
ATI (AMD now) has not had a problem with drivers for some years now and they are considered at least on par with nVidia. Where nVidia has a slight advantage is that for the titles that they pay (The Way It's Meant To Be Played) they have excellent support from day 1. For ATI in some cases you will have to wait for the next driver update for e.g. eyefinity to work properly, although as I said the good quality of the drivers generally leads to newly released games having no problems. Also, note th
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I don't have any problems with ATI drivers. I suspect some of the people complaining are doing some odd things, like overclocking various components past the limits of their particular hardware (some units perform better than others at this obviously) and/or using cheap components elsewhere in their systems - e.g. built-in sound, low cost "Value" RAM, factory seconds from a computer fair, etc... All of these things contribute to instability. It's also possible that yet others were using off-brand bargain AT
$200 is "mid" range? (Score:3, Insightful)
When a decent computer sells for $500, how is $200 "mid" range?
I must be getting old... I still have to hold my nose to pay more than $100 for a video card.
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I'm confused that some people call $200 a bargain for a videocard alone and then turn around and say that $700 for a Mac is way too expensive.
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I'm not. The major reason why $200 is a bargain for a video card is because that adds capability to the computer - Compare it to buying a game console. As far as a Mac goes, you're paying more for virtually the same machine but for running a different OS - Hell, even the hardware other than the processor in a Mac are generic OEM parts, like for example Hitachi hard drives. Considering the "$500 for a decent computer" remark, saying that a Mac costs $700 (they don't - Try $1300 for an iMac) means that, for t
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I wasn't talking about you specifically, sorry if it sounded that way. Yes a Mac is 99% the same as a PC as far as hardware goes, but that gets you Mac OS X too, which I am indeed counting. As for the $700 Mac, look at the Mac mini.
Re:$200 is "mid" range? (Score:4, Insightful)
In much the way $600 is cheap for a SLR camera, but $50 is cheap for an average home camera.
The $200 mid range for a card for a gaming rig, not mid range for an e-machine or other generic computer 'decent enough to use for most stuff' computer you get from a big box store.
If you aren't into high end gaming with the latest graphics crunching game, at really high resolution and fps, that's fine. Other folks are and have a different definition of what's 'mid' range for a gaming machine than you have for a generic machine.
In other words, this article isn't aimed at you. That's ok. Not every one has to be.
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Ahh... but I do play games (sometimes), and I also do video editing (which, granted, doesn't require a lot of 3D performance). I don't buy $30 video cards, I buy cards that are actually quite good in the $100 range.
I understand the scale... if the high end of consumer cards is $400 or more, then $200 is more mid than high end, but the article frames this as being a "bargain" card.
If, on the other hand, you were to look at the median price paid for a new graphics card, I think it would be far below $200, in
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If I can get the features and framerate of cards that normally cost $500 for $250, that's a bargain.
First you were complaining $200 wasn't mid range by your definition, now you are complaining a bargain isn't a bargain unless it's in your price range.
Once again, you are not the target market for this article. That's ok.
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I'm not sure I'd call a $500 computer a "decent" computer in any respect (these are typically the disposable cameras of the computer world), but $200 for a video card isn't too out of touch. If you consider that you're buying a computer anyway and that you'll be getting a base level of value out of the computer whether or not you added that video card, you end up with adding a $200 piece of hardware to the machine in order to play games on it. Considering that the cheapest of consoles on the market right no
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Remember the LOLAMO (Score:3, Insightful)
Remember Nvidia's last great bargain card, the 8800 GT?
You know, the one everyone bought at $200?
You know, the one everyone said was the best value?
You know, the one with the bad bumps?
For GPUs:
If you don't need to play games, go integrated or go with cheap, cheap shit.
If you want to play games, ALWAYS go with a flagship line.
For Nvidia, these have been 6800, 7800, 8800, 9800, 280, 480.
For ATi these have been 9700/9800, x800 x1800, HD 2850, HD 3870, HD 4870.
If you can't afford the latest and greatest, get a used one from the last generation. The flagship cards are the only ones that undergo any worthwhile testing. The flagship cards are the only ones where the OEMs and Nvidia/ATi work together and formulate a gameplan.
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OK, a question for you as I've been trying to figure out the answer to this for a while :) Maybe you'd be so kind as to offer a bit of advice.
I currently have a 7800GT which is basically fine for me performance wise, but I'd like to get some of the nice stuff like HD video and Photoshop acceleration which newer cards have. I don't really game heavily on the PC but I do sometimes fire up something like Audiosurf or Civ so I'd like something better than integrated graphics. Otherwise, my main concern is power
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Well, HDMI is generally compatible with DVI via a relatively inexpensive adapter (which I think most cards come with). So a card with one of each DVI, HDMI and VGA ports actually has the capacity for two DVI devices (or two HDMI devices). I'm fairly sure this is the case with the GT 240; In Zotac's case [zotacusa.com], they actually include an HDMI to DVI cable (it's just a dongle, shown here, but should do the job [zotacusa.com]).
For a while, I was running my X-Box 360 Elite via an HDMI to DVI converter on my 22" monitor; Interestingly
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Genius, the cards with the bad bumps were the mobile GPUs, not the desktop chips.
Also the 8800GT was the best value card. I'm still running one and it runs great.
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For Nvidia, these have been 6800, 7800, 8800, 9800, 280, 480.
An Nvidia 250GTS *is* a 9800 with slightly less power consumption. If you can't afford a 280, a 250 is a reasonable purchase. Makes more sense than buying a 9800 today.
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An Nvidia 250GTS *is* a 9800 with slightly less power consumption. If you can't afford a 280, a 250 is a reasonable purchase. Makes more sense than buying a 9800 today.
I've been seeing 9800s for around $80, so depending on what titles you want to play it might be fine. I bought a GT240 which is 3/4 the processors of a 250, it is a little more than 3/4 the card for around 1/2 the wattage. [wikipedia.org] right now newegg has it for $69.99 after MIR [newegg.com] and $6.98 shipping. It's non-SLI, it goes with my GA-MA770-UD3P and Phenom II X3 720, all (relatively) low power. And mb/cpu/vid each cost $100 when I got them which is my personal maximum, and the board while slightly warty (black screen on XP
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Actually, I bought a GT240 (for $10 more than this, but it was 6 months ago and had a free Capcom game (I chose Resident Evil 5) with it). The difference is that there were two models for the same price: a 1GB DDR3 model and a 512MB GDDR5 model... and one of my friends warned me that the GDDR5 model was probably the better buy, simply because the memory clock speed was more likely to be a bottleneck before the memory amount was.
Speaking of which, that exact card [newegg.com] as well as its 1GB DDR3 edition [newegg.com] are $64.99 o
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Wait, the 8800 GT is part of the flagship line, is it not? I mean you included the 8800 in the flagship list without specifying GTX....
Integrated can be fine... (Score:2)
Many builds I've done have used integrated where the toughest task the card would have is compiz/aero/video scaling. Memory bandwidth and contention will only kill you if you do something significantly more than that.
I do agree that the flagship is overrated, and while the 8800* parts were afflicted by poor quality, that is not a good reason to extrapolate across the board on the quality of midrange parts. Generally, the benchmarks are what you get and quality isn't a big problem.
His last point has some m
Rubbish (Score:2)
The bandwidth needed to supply an integrated graphics card is about 0.00001% of what's available in a modern PC. You're just not going to notice it.
Plus ... integrated undergoes an awful lot of testing. eg. Intel drivers are always rock solid, unlike some 'high end' cards I've bought where I had to wait a couple of months before I could even put it in the machine.
A video card that will live in infamy! (Score:2, Informative)
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It is somewhat infamous, mostly due to being vastly over-hyped -- running comparably to ATI's six-month-old cards at the time of its release was not worthy of the hype machine Nvidia had going throughout the several delays.
How Slashdot has changed (fallen?) (Score:2)
Here's a story about a video card and I don't see any posts on how it works with Linux.
And the number of "new, weird and/or funky Linux distro" stories has fallen to less than one per week. There used to be two a day.
My, how times have changed.
Quiet and GP-GPU potential (Score:2)
As well as being a relative bargain, this is the quietest GPU in its power range, especially considering it uses the Fermi architecture.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3809/nvidias-geforce-gtx-460-the-200-king/16 [anandtech.com]
It's going to be a great boon for those who would like great GP-GPU performance too. Custom raytracing, and scientific research is going to get a kick from this.