Tech

Best 'bang for the buck' graphics cards

It seems that gamers are no longer willing to blow $500 on a graphics card. More and more of you wan to know what's the best graphics card you can buy on a limited budget. In this post I will look at the best graphics card you can buy in four different price brackets.

Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Senior Contributing Editor Oct. 15, 2009 at 11:41 p.m. PT

It seems that gamers are no longer willing to blow $500 on a graphics card. More and more of you wan to know what's the best graphics card you can buy on a limited budget.

In this post I will look at the best graphics card you can buy in four different price brackets.

Sub $100

You can pick up some truly excellent graphics cards for under $100. In fact, if you buy the right bit of kit, you can pretty much get all the graphics card you'll need for under $100.

There are two cards in particular worth looking at:

SAPPHIRE 100265HDMI Radeon HD 4830 512MB (around $95)
PowerColor AX4850 512MD3-PH Radeon HD 4850 512MB (around $99)

Given the choice I'd go for the PowerColor card because it offers a little more performance. Other than that, both have dual-monitor support, support for HDMI and offer a great gaming experience.

Sub $200

OK, with an increased budget you are looking at graphics cards that can deliver amazing gaming experience at high resolutions. Graphics cards in this price category are aimed at hardcore enthusiasts and in order to get the best from them the rest of your hardware has to be of high-spec too. There's no point adding an expensive graphics card to a low-end PC!

In the sub $200 price category you want to be looking at cards such as the following:

XFX HD-577A-ZNFC Radeon HD 5770 1GB (around $175)
EVGA 896-P3-1257-AR GeForce GTX 260 (around $199)

Here I'd go for the Radeon HD 5770 because it's a newer card , based on newer technology, more powerful and cheaper than the NVIDIA card.

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Sub $300

OK, now we're at the extreme end of desktop graphics. If you're spending this sort of money then you need a very high-end PC indeed because investing this sort of money is otherwise a waste.

The cards you want to be looking at in this price range are based on the Radeon HD 5850 GPU. These are a bit thin on the ground at present so might be hard to find.