What's the best Budget Video Card?

Xcellor

Hi all,

Looking for a new video card that is better than my existing Geforce 3 TI 200 64mb. My budget is preferably less than 100e and my supplier is either komplett or elara (or any other within europe that couriers).

Thanks

X

ssh

Taking this as a fairly representative benchmark:

http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031229/vga-charts-03.html

I'd say any FX5200 would be your best bet. Though picking up a second hand Ti4200 would still offer you the highest performance/price.

Dr Bolouswki

ahhh dude.... creative were selling ti4200's for €80 last week and I posted here and where were you!!

for benchmarking results try this link

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/over2003/index.html

but probably best bet is a 9600 (avoid SE variants of ALL cards)

just over the €100 would get you a 9600 - which is the best thing without going the whole hog

check this for more info on ATI cards

http://www.ati.com/products/radeon9600/radeon9600pro/compare.html

and just to make you wnat to spend more money check this

http://www.ati.com/products/radeon9800/radeon9800pro/compare.html

Woden

shameless plug dcully is selling a ti4200 over on the for sale board which is a decent enough card but probably not the performance increase you are hoping for

if i where you i'd stretch the budget to a 9600 or 9600 pro

something like this

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=119625&cks=PRL

or this

http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=120318&cks=PRL

don't be fooled by the lower memory amount on the second card it will perform better then the first one, note also that that powercolour card is a pro EZ version which is clocked somewhat less then a normal 9600 pro look into the frequencies anyway

data

ssh

Yeah, data is kind of right. In 8 months time, will you really miss the extra E50 for getting a card which gives you so much more happiness?

Xcellor

I will probably hold off for now... I mean the likely contender was a Geforce 5200 but that doesn't seem to offer much more than my current Geforce 3 Ti 200 which is still able to play even modern games well.. like Deus ex 2 invisible war, call to duty... but isn't capable of high reso textures... it slows down to a halt nearly.

Maybe I should wait until I get a new comp. My current set up is 1.6 Ghz with 1024 SDRAM... AGP 4x does 8x make much of a difference?

X

Woden

no 8x makes very little difference to 4x at the moment which makes me wonder what all the hype is about 16x pci express slots anywho there is benchmarks on tomshardware about that as well somewhere.

edit - look at the massive difference in having a 8x motherboard

http://www20.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040310/pcie-03.html