We grab six low-cost videocards from the bargain shelf to see whether enthusiast-class gaming performance can be had on a miser's budget

We’re constantly on the hunt for top-shelf PC performance—you’re not reading Bottom-Feeder PC, after all. When rendering our review verdicts, we do factor in price, but recommending a subpar product just because it’s cheap is sacrilege to us. Pricing can be relevant, but when it comes to videocards, we typically anchor our opinions on the toughest criteria we know of: 3D performance in the most demanding games on the market, at resolutions of 1920x1200 and higher and with all eye candy enabled.
 
While our editorial mantra might best be expressed as “better, faster, stronger” (hey, we should do a cover story on that!), there’s no escaping the fact that the videocard market boasts a broad spectrum of inexpensive—and intriguing—alternatives. In fact, as AMD and Nvidia have been battling for supremacy at the top of the market, we’ve watched the entry points for penultimate-performance videocards gradually but consistently come down to earth. Sure, playing Crysis on a 30-inch panel might be out of the question if you’re running one of the lower-priced cards, but we still wanted to discover the 3D tipping point—the point at which you’re better off giving up PC gaming altogether because the card you’re running is horribly, utterly lacking in horsepower.

To hack our way through the 3D puzzle, we assembled a field of six videocards, ranging in price from less than $100 to a maximum of $250. We asked AMD and Nvidia to pick three of their best third-party representatives within this spectrum, but it must be noted that we’re not pitting the two companies against one another. This article is not an AMD versus Nvidia cage match. In a nutshell, we wanted to know how little you could spend before your 3D firepower became woefully incapable, and for this reason we’ll be presenting our six reviews in street-price order, from lowest to highest.
 
In our book, an acceptable gaming card must be capable of running Far Cry 2 and Crysis at 60 frames per second with a resolution of 1680x1050. Anything short of this performance metric falls below our basic expectations (though for these two games we are willing to sacrifice antialiasing and some other high-end features). Similarly, an acceptable card must be able to play Call of Duty 4 at 60fps at that same 1680x1050 resolution with 4x antialiasing.
 
Nonetheless, all “frame rate is king” posturing aside, we’re also of the opinion that you don’t necessarily have to be a hardcore gamer to be a PC enthusiast, so we also examined each budget card’s feature set to evaluate its home-theater capabilities. And after taking price, performance, and feature set into consideration, we awarded a pass-or-fail rating to each card—this in addition to our usual numeric verdict. Bottom line: If a card receives a fail mark, it’s not worth your money, no matter how cheap it sells for.

So, PC enthusiasts don’t have to be gamers, but can they be skinflints? Let’s find out.

The Reviews

PowerColor Radeon HD 4830

PowerColor Radeon HD 4850

EVGA GeForce 9800 GT

EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

HIS IceQ 4+ Radeon HD 4870

EVGA GeForce GTX 275