Computers & Hardware > PC Hardware
Budget Graphics cards
Floydoid:
Hi all,
I'm thinking about upgrading my graphics card pretty soon... I currently have a 64 MB radeon, which is OK generally, but can be a bit sluggish on hi-res videos. I'm not into gaming so I'm not looking for a top notch spec.
Now, I'm a bit of a cheapskate and only have a budget of about £50... so what would you good people out there recommend?
Floydoid:
I meant to add, I have an AGP slot.
feliscatusx2:
I have just ordered a Connect3d ATI 9550 AGP 256 MB RAM 4x/8x card with a heatsink and no noisy little fan. This cost £40.88 from Amazon. It will do what I want it to do, which does not include playing games.
Reviews have been mainly favourable, and ATI based cards tend to have superior on screen graphics performance to nVidia (the pictures on your screen look nicer).
However I can't comment further because it hasn't arrived yet, and the PC needs building up before I can try it out.
This card also comes in a 128 Mb version, there is also the 9250 card with both memory sizes which is even cheaper, but with less performance.
Might be worth a Google, or even a Scroogle.
soms:
With the exception of games, the Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP was good. I had one for a nice while.
I had one made my XFX, it had a nice heatsink and no fan and had 256MB RAM. 2D graphics were crystal clear, obviously all the cards made in the last few years have hardware acceleration for DVD so that was great and other video worked great too. It could even play DirectX9 games on low to medium settings (until you insisted on hardware intensive /demanding things like anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering). That cost around £50 at the time, so probably cheaper now.
Far better than the Radeon 9250, probably not much, if any better than the 9550. You can normally find reviews with performance comparisons using Google.
Beware that there is some sort of PCI express version and cheapo "turbocache" versions which use system memory as graphics memory, merely to save money on the manufacturing and further hinder performance.
Floydoid:
I was actually looking at this one: http://www.ebuyer.com/UK/product/54837
(I said I was a cheapskate)
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