Video cards for every budget
Many PC hardware review sites like to do the occasional “state of the graphics card market” type review where they make some overall generalizations about which video cards are the good buys at the time. Typically, these sites will lump cards into 3 categories, by price:
- “Budget” - about $150
- “Performance” - about $250
- “Enthusiast” - about $450
Of course, those categories are complete rubbish, and (hopefully) everyone reading hardware sites realizes this. The idea that a $100 to $150 video card is “budget” is beyond ludicrious. The fact is, if you spend much more than this, you are simply not getting a good value for your dollar. If you spend $150 on a video card every 18 months or so, you will essentially always be able to play all of the latest games at high settings. If you instead spent $300 on a video card, you will not in general be able to go 36 months on that same card with all the latest games at high settings. So, assuming your goal is to always be able to play games at high settings, you will end up spending much more if you buy $300 cards than if you buy $150 cards.
The preceding paragraph has some caveats. The $150 number assumes you have a monitor running 1680 x 1050 or perhaps 1920 x 1200. These are the standard numbers for the now very cheap 22″ and 24″ widescreen monitors, respectively. If you are using a smaller monitor, running, for example, 1280 x 1024, you might get by spending less. Similarly, if you have a monster 30″ monitor that runs 2560 x 1600, you will probably need to spend a bit more.
The reason for this is that the now ubiquitous LCD monitors usually only look good at their “native” (highest possible) resolution. So, the situation is different than what it was when CRT monitors reigned supreme. With CRTs, you can easily switch between a number of different resolutions. On LCD monitors, you almost always want to be running at whatever your screen’s maximum resolution is.
“That’s all well and good”, you say, “but I thought I was getting a video card review!” Indeed, you are. Below is the list of cards I would currently pick at a number of price points. Bear in mind that unless you have a monstrous monitor setup, spending more than $150 or maybe $200 just doesn’t make sense.
General price information was determined through newegg.com. The numbers should not be taken as exact.
- $80 - Radeon HD 4670. This card doesn’t have the muscle to run many current games at the highest settings. However, it doesn’t need a seperate power connector, is small, runs fairly cool, and is inexpensive.
- $120 - GeForce 9800 / 8800 GT. Don’t be fooled by the name, the 8800 GT and the 9800 GT are, for all intents and purposes, the same card. The 8800 GT was basically just an early card in the 9 series. However, NVidia probably didn’t want to unveil the 9 series with a card that is slightly slower than the much older 8800 GTS.
- $150 - Radeon HD 4850. This is currently the best option for most gamers. This card packs some serious punch, enough to run just about anything current at the highest settings. It is not too expensive, requires only one 6 pin power connector (meaning good compatibility with most power supplies), and fits in a single slot, unlike most of the more expensive cards.
- $180 - GeForce 9800 GTX +. Note that this is the “GTX +”, not the vanilla “GTX”, which is being phased out. This card is slightly faster than than HD 4850 by most benchmarks, but more expensive and it is sized to fill up 2 standard sized slots.
- $250 - Radeon HD 4870. This is AMD / ATI’s current high end single GPU option. It is quite powerful (edging out the GeForce GTX 260 192 core in most tests) and is single slot, which is nice.
- $300 - GeForce GTX 260 (216 cores). Note that there are 2 versions of the GTX 260, the earlier one with 190 cores and the newer with 216 cores. The 216 core version is slightly faster than the HD 4870 and slightly slower than the GTX 280.
I won’t go on to any higher price points. Beyond the $300 mark, we have the GTX 280, the HD 4870 X2, and the option of going with a multiple card setup. However, all these are prohibitively priced considering the relatively small performance gains.
